Ultra Cool Gadgets

Ideal for home and office use, the Scansnap S300M USB Mobile Scanner makes digitizing receipts, bank statements, or term papers a snap. Easy to use, this scanner comes with a simple “scan” button and with the scanner’s duplex capabilities, it captures both sides of documents with one pass. The S300M also offers a host of automatic image correction features to ensure great scanning results. It can scan A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, business card, letter, legal, and custom sizes. The S300M automatically recognizes the size of each document, detects and corrects for skew, and shows images in their proper orientation with blank pages removed, which saves storage space in your computer’s memory. With the ability to capture full color scans at 600 x 600 dpi, and with high speed USB 2.0 connectivity, this scanner is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 and later operating systems including OS X 10.5.

Technical Details:
USB mobile duplex scanner
Scans A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, business card, letter, legal documents
Duplex scanner captures both sides of a page in a single pass
High speed USB 2.0 connectivity (USB 1.1 compatible)
Compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 and later operating systems including OS X 10.5

Customer feedback:

1. This scanner is simply the best I have ever seen. The flat bed scanners and the all-in-ones I have used with my Intel iMac G5 all suffered from various problems that made scanning a maddening experience that I couldn’t fit into the work flow of any project regardless of how simple it might have seemed. Most scanners are geared for the PC world and Mac software is mediocre at best and usually flat out useless. This scanner and its software are aimed at the Mac market and they have done it the right way.
Following the quick start instructions to the letter, and I suggest you read them all the way through before starting, I had the unit up and running in a few minutes. It doesn’t take long to see the beauty of opening the unit and putting something in to be scanned, pressing the “scan” button and seeing the resulting PDF on your screen within seconds! There are many output and storage options as well, to fit just about any workflow application.

2. Tiny. Fast. Push one button. (Although there’s also a very nifty Quick Menu that let’s you rename, file in a specific location, send to iPhoto, print, email, etc.) It’s unbelievably small and light and unbelievably fast.
I’m an artist/designer/educator and I’m always clipping images and arcane bits of text. I sent odd size pieces of flimsy paper from the New York Times magazine without a hitch. I love this product. It’s one of the best purchases I ever made.

Take document scanning to a whole new level with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 Color Mobile Scanner. Whether you’re at home digitizing receipts, bank statements or term papers, or at the office capturing mission critical documents for a business trip, ScanSnap takes scanning beyond the desktop and into your world.
The ScanSnap S300 is the world’s smallest duplex ADF scanner. It’s designed to provide best-in-class performance inside or outside of the home or office. With the S300 scanner, you can view PDF and JPEG files with the thumbnail viewer, arrange files with simple drag and drop actions, easily insert and delete images, change thumbnail display sizes, automatically create searchable PDF files, and make use of a quick drag-and-drop function to send files to e-mail or to a printer.

Technical Details:
Color Mobile Scanner with ADF (Automatic Document Feeder)
Optical Resolution of 600 dpi x 600 dpi; Compatible with Windows® 2000 Professional and Windows® XP Professional / Home Edition (Service Pack 1 or higher)and also compatible with Windows® Vista.
Instantly creates searchable PDF content from your scans
Thumbnail viewer and drag-and-drop functionality for easy file management
Operates on USB bus power; one-year limited warranty

Customer feedback:

1. Long and short of it is this: I’ve finally lived long enough to see one hardware manufacturer get everything right. There’s a pdf manual, but I read it only to investigate consumables (thought it would be a “gotcha!” but was pleasantly suprised at the reasonable cost). I assume you’re reading these reviews carefully (as I did), trying to decide between the ScanSnap and a lower priced alternative. For once, I decided not to play cheapskate, and boy oh boy, am I glad!! (The price here has already escalated a bit, so do it now, my friend!)

2. I had been looking into replacing my flatbed scanner, but was intrigued by this small, mainly PDF unit. I decided to go for it for 2 reasons: 1) 99% of what I scan are documents perfect for PDFs, and 2) the scanner’s small size. I am so happy with this scanner! The PDFs are crisp and clear, much better than my flatbed scanner. The scanner reads both sides of a page at once and automatically removes blank pages. It’s also quite a bit faster and much quieter than my other scanner (which I’m keeping for handling photos and other types of scans). The software that comes with the scanner is nice – not hard to use/learn.
I’m using a PC running Windows XP, not a laptop. Don’t feel that you need to be mobile to justify using this scanner, although I’m sure that would be a main selling point for those who are on the go.

The ScanSnap S1500M provides Mac users an effective way to greatly reduce paper clutter, storage space, and security risk associated with unmanaged paperwork at home or office. Even better, documents scanned by ScanSnap take on a higher level of accessibility and usefulness once liberated into the digital realm.

Product Features:
USB 2.0 50PG ADF LGL & A3 W/CARRIER

Technical Details:
Scanner Type: Sheetfed
Scanner Element: CCD
Light Source: White Cold Cathode Discharge Lamp
Optical Resolution: 600 x 600 DPI
Maximum Document Size: 8.5″ x 14.17″
Interface Connectivity: USB 2.0
Power Source: AC Adapter

Customer feedback:

1. Great tool. What a scanner should be. This is another world from the speed and software efficiency you have in the average scanner and All In One Printers. So I am happy to have both a AIO device and this great tool for document management.

My use:
Now all the invoices and in general, all my printed documents are converted into searchable pdf into an easy to access archive. I can recover from a fax or a printed document and edit it in word or excel tables or iWork and save a lot of time retyping. Business cards are archived in a short time and included in my address book and so also on my iPhone.

2. I’ve scanned approximately 15,000 pages with this scanner and it couldn’t have been easier. I did get the occasional “paper jam” when the sheet feeder picked up the next page as it was feeding the current page. Clearing a jam is trivial: pop the cover open, remove the pages, snap the cover back, continue scanning. Considering I was feeding in papers from 15 – 20 years ago, I expected the pages to occasionally stick together. This scanner is worth every penny.

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. Even better, documents scanned by ScanSnap take on a higher level of accessibility and usefulness once liberated into the digital realm.

Technical Details:
One button searchable PDF creation
Intelligent paper feed detection
Blazing 20ppm color scanning
50-page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF)
Comes with Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard

Customer feedback:

1. The speed is absolutely blinding – an incredible 20 pages per minute but, because it scans both sides of a page at the same time, double sided documents scan at 40 PAGES PER MINUTE! Wow! As with previous models, this scanner is very small and appears to be well built: it’s quite heavy for its small size and fits very nicely on my small computer desk. The scanning quality is equally spectacular – it scans up to 600 dpi in color, grayscale, and black and white and mine came with a good assortment of software (Adobe Acrobat 9, Rack2-Filer, and ABBYY FineReader). It scans documents beautifully! While I’ve been too busy scanning the billions of pieces of paper that have cluttered my life for years (this scanner will actually do that quickly and efficiently – something I’ve always just dreamed would be possible), I haven’t yet tried to scan photos; I suspect that this scanner will do a good job but that another type of scanner would probably do better for archival purposes).

2. I have never had a dedicated document scanner before. In the past, I used the Auto-document feeder on my all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines to scan documents into adobe acrobat. That meant for each batch of papers, I needed to set the color/resolution/paper size/quality settings and then work through Acrobat in order to save each file. It worked, but it was slow going.
Then I bought this new scansnap 1500, based on the ratings of the earlier model (the scansnap 510). I installed only the main program to my computer (the software also includes OCR programs, organizational programs, and acrobat 9, which I already have). I hooked up the scanner and stuck in a stack of old notes I took from some college courses–some notes were in color, some were b&w, some on two sides, some on one side, and some of the pages were upside down. I hit the only button on the machine (SCAN), and to my sheer amazement, it started flying through the stack of notes without any additional prompts or effort. It then automatically saved my file as a pdf–all of the pages were in order, color pages were in color, b&w pages were in b&w, etc. The only issue I noticed was that if there were any marks whatsoever on the back side of my note papers, it included those blank pages in the file.