This S1500 with Deluxe Bundle was an upgrade from the S500 which I put through a problem free rigorous 4+ year workout. I bought this model because of a Windows 7, 64 bit laptop upgrade and I thought now was the time to put the S500 out to pasture (besides Fujitsu did not produce a workable patch for the S500).

I’m an international aviation consultant who scans boxes of aircraft documents for analysis and archive so portability, ease of use and reliability are foremost. I’ve made colleagues using other scanners envious of the speed and quality of both the S1500 and the S500 before which reassures my choice of this product.

While the OCR conversion feature provided by the included Adobe software is not flawless it works well enough for searches of 100 plus page reports saving me hours of flipping through pages of tabulated data.

The “CardMinder” software is one of the best added software bundles to come along in a long time. I’ve scanned hundreds of business cards into files which are easily edited, archived as well as uploaded to Outlook Contacts.

For anyone requiring quality, fast, reliable and portable scanning capabilities I would highly recommend the S1500.

If you’re like me you’ve been looking everywhere for a photo scanner that has an ADF to finally digitize all of your photos. Like me, you probably don’t want to spend the rest of the year scanning with a flatbed but probably also aren’t comfortable shipping away your memories in a Fedex box to a scan service. All I want is a digital copy of my pictures for purposes of scrapbooking or loading onto photo sharing sites.

Well, I’m happy to say that the ScanSnap might just help you out. On my first night playing with ScanSnap, I scanned in a few pieces of mail and about 75 – 4×6 photos from the 80’s and 90’s. I was VERY happy with the results and am now in the process of scanning the rest of my photos, my parents and some of my friends, too.

On scan quality:

* The first couple scans yielded a burn mark across the top of the scanned image. I’m going to work with Fujitsu to troubleshoot that issue. However, I found that I could scan the images face up (it defaults to face down) and the burnt edges went away. A little dust streaking here and there needed to be cleaned up, but other than that, no other scanner marks or burned spots. (I’ll be posting images for a sample of the burn marks)

* The scanned image comes out really nicely – very close to the original. Now, these are just snapshots from point and shoot cameras so you have to realize that they can be grainy to begin with. This scanner serves my purpose perfectly which is to preserve my photos and provide a little organization.

* Scanned at 600dpi. I did a test for a few photos using both the ScanSnap S1500 and my Canon Lide Scan 30 (just your run of the mill desktop scanner). I’ll post some side-by-side comparisons. I’m sure there’s tweaking to be done on both sides, but the ScanSnap holds up on clarity and the color is actually a little brighter IMO. (The scan settings on the flatbed may have washed out the color a little) For any photos I plan to enlarge, I’ll scan on a flatbed at a higher DPI, but since most of the original are 4×6, I’m not gaining much but file size.

* I referenced the following that have great info on batch scanning photos:
o […] Here the writer suggests that you won’t gain much by scanning at higher than 200 dpi!!
o For a more detailed explanation read here: […] , replete with a […]
o Since the ScanSnap is so quick, I plan on sticking with 600, but all the same

* Another note, the setting to “Continue scanning after current scan is finished” is quite helpful. The feeder fits about 25 photos easily (maybe more, but I haven’t tried to stuff more in). You can use this option to continue to feed the tray when the previous 10 are done and all the images will be scanned in the same batch.

On document organization:
* I do want to go paperless. I’m terrible at filing and this has given me an opportunity to get rid of all those loose papers. There’s plenty out there on why it’s good to be paperless (security, organization, etc) so I won’t bore you with that. This scanner is lightening quick and doesn’t make filing a chore. I’ve gotten rid of my filing cabinet full of documents from the past few years in only a couple of days. I don’t want to make light of it’s perfection as a document scanner but there are already plenty of testaments to it’s speed and ease of use.

Hopefully this helps you all out there who are looking at the ScanSnap as a photo scanner. Let me emphasize, it’s not professional quality and a more discerning eye might shun the use of a document scanner for photos. Some other users have mentioned why they don’t think it’s a good photo scanner, but for me this scanner is perfect! In one night, I whipped through 200 while watching TV!

I have scanned about 8000 sheets so far. I have found these settings helpful with rack2filer:

1. Auto color detection, Duplex, Best image quality (300dpi Color/Grey 600dpi BW), Options [Only Blank page removal checked (no auto rotation – slows down page viewing)], Continuous scanning.

2. Same as above except change color mode to gray.

And in general I have found:

The multifeed detector works great and has detected many double feeds. It handles old thin thermal fax paper without double feeds – pretty amazing, because I would think that if anything would jam or double feed it would be that. The prompt shows the image of the detected multifeed and gives you the option of keeping it or discarding it – this has been helpful when it detects sticky notes on scanned paper that are supposed to be there.

It has handled many old papers – barely legible and has done an adequate job picking up light print.

Very light or old papers with light print or pencil hand writing are better handled by forcing the color detection to grey. Otherwise Auto everything works well.

Blank page detection – does not work with the other side of lined loose leaf paper or graph paper that has nothing written on it. That is to be expected – but a possible design improvement idea for this product. And to get around this, I have set the scanning side to single-sided. Otherwise blank page detection worked well.

Scans looked exactly like the originals and in rack2 filer the binders read and looked as well as the paper binders.

When it does jam (which was rarely the scanners fault and mostly from staples, taped paper or over loading), the prompt shows the last few pages scanned which makes it easy to recover.

Fanning and creating a step-like pattern of your paper stack before loading the paper makes a big difference in preventing paper jams.

Some of the advantages:

I can take many binders worth on information with me on my notebook without dragging the heavy paper binders in my bag – or one of those wheeled bags that my colleagues use.

There is the security of now being able to have multiple copies of my binders in physically different locations [desktop, notebook, and off site backups] all without using a copy machine.

I need less space for file cabinets [files], bookshelves [binders], and thus less office space.

Everything is now in one place. My office is too small to have all my binders and files together, but now they all fit in one folder on my hard drive.

Although I will still use paper to write on, I don’t foresee a reason to ever need to bind or file papers anymore. Just take notes, scan, and recycle.

The actual images for Rack2Filer and CardMinder are in PDF files so if anything happens with Rack2filer – you can always access the data via windows explorer and acrobat.

I have used NeatWorks for my accounting (receipts), documents, and business cards for about a year now. The mobile scanner scans at 3 ppm black and white and 2ppm color – single sided only. So for duplex color ScanSnap is (20ppm x 2)/2ppm = 20x faster – a huge improvement. The NeatWorks software is also heavy and slow compared to Rack2filer and CardMinder.

However, NeatWorks is better than ScanSnap organizer or Rack2filer for receipts. And it can import the PDF scans from the S1500. So, I recommend using NeatWorks software (not the NeatWorks/Desk scanner) for receipts, Rack2Filer for documents and CardMinder for Business cards.