Scansnap S1500 Scanner, Overview

The ScanSnap S1500 provides Windows® users an effective way to greatly reduce paper clutter, storage space, and security risk associated with unmanaged paperwork at home or office. If you're someone who's interested in digitizing and archiving all your paper receipts and financial and legal documents--or just about anything you have on paper--there are a handful of consumer sheet-fed scanners to choose from, including Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1500.

The good news first, starting with the most superficial: The S1500 looks good. It can nicely complement an executive office decor, with its silver and black color scheme and a design that's as close to being sleek as any document scanner. According to Fujitsu, the S1500 can scan at a rate of 20 pages per minute which is really close when compared its performance under actual situations (350 page within 17 minutes which is certainly excellent).

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Setup is standard fare. Install the software, plug in the power cord and a USB cable, let Windows recognize the scanner, and you're ready for your first scan. I installed the ScanSnap on a Windows Vista system, but according to Fujitsu the disc includes a full set of software for Windows 2000 and XP as well as a Mac version of the scan utility

The included OCR software is very easy to use, OCRs and coverts the PDFs in the background. The resulting PDFs are images of the original page with real text underneath, permitting searches and cut'n'paste. The output tray is one of the few weaknesses of the hardware. Sheets emerging from the scanner tend to catch previous pages and push them, sometimes completely off the tray, but almost always into a fairly unruly pile. It's worse if the documents are of mixed sizes.

The S1500 can also serve as a first-rate business-card scanner, running cards through its ADF at high speed, recognizing text reasonably well, and sending the results to a variety of programs. It can also send directly to Outlook Express, Goldmine, and ACT, as well as save the data in a comma-separated variable file, which Excel and most database programs can read.

But on the negative side, according Fujistu themselves, scanning paperwork that has straight lines, a box, etc on it you'll notice that when scanned, there will be some slight waves in the lines. This minor detail by no means takes away from how awesome this scanner is but be aware of it.

For those looking for something even smaller and more portable, Fujitsu also makes the S300M, which costs about $250. However, the S300M is geared toward receipts and short documents.
For about $400 online, the S1500 isn't cheap, but it's reasonably priced for what it does and how well it performs. The fact is, if you're looking to get out from under all the paper that's overwhelming you--or just taking up space--the Fujitsu S1500 is a small but powerful organizational weapon which makes it one of the best in the business!.

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