I have used many flatbed scanners in the past with good results. However, the need to reposition and replace page after page makes them useful only for photos or single page documents.

The ScanSnap 1500M runs through piles of paper without hesitation. There are a few times that the document feeder gets into trouble with carbon copies or small/irregular shaped pieces of paper. The software has the most user-friendly and intelligent handling of these situations, turning frustration for most scanners into merely an extra step here and there.

Money well spent.I have scanned three bankers boxes of files with only one hiccup. Have not used the OCR function fully as I prefer to keep files organized via the filesystem. I have not yet started on the receipts yet, so there may be some issues there I have not yet encountered. Thus far, I would definitely buy again.

I’ve never felt compelled to write a review for anything I’ve purchased on Amazon until now. This is an exceptional product…

I’ve scanned all my tax information, business records and important information to PDF for several years now, but it required I lug my documents to Kinko’s or use other scanners that I have had available to me. Since the feeders on other scanners would only accept one paper size in a batch, I would tape several smaller receipts to 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, or scan the documents one at a time and then merge them into a single PDF document later-either way it was a very labor intensive process. I finally decided to buy my own scanner which I’ll use primarily for text documents. Every scanner I’ve used before has been a pain. Not any more…

Within 5 minutes of receiving it I had installed the software, updated the software for Snow Leopard and was ready for my first scan. My first impressions: It is much smaller than I expected (fits nicely on my desk), has a well made feel/fit and finish and the color goes nicely with my mac setup.

After setting up a couple different profiles (DPI, color, gray or BW, duplex, etc) I loaded several different different size documents and pressed the single blue scan button on the front of the machine. Seconds later I had a new PDF show up in my selected folder. The pages of the pdf were straight with none of the slant that I get from most sheet feeders I’ve used on scanner before. Each scanned document was the correct size and not forced to fit on an 8 1/2 x 11.

Here are the pros of the amazing scanner:

-Fast & quiet

-Scans both sides of a document at the same time for duplex

-Auto rotates pages so that up is up

-Automatically fixes pages that load slanted through the feeder

-Auto sizing

-Scans multiple size documents in one scan batch

-Senses if multiple pages feed at the same time and stops the scan job allowing you to correct the problem and continue scanning into the same document if you wish

-Can scan to Word, Excel or OCR

-Easily configure different profiles for different types of scanning

-2 click selection of a new profile from the Dock

-Zero confusing buttons on the hardware

-PDF compression settings

One minor con:

-It would be nice to be able attach the scanner to an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule and connect to multiple computers wirelessly

In short this scanner seems to fix every single gripe I’ve had about every other scanner I’ve ever used.

I am one of those people who keeps every scrap of paper for fear that I will need something later. That receipt for the shirt I bought 5 years ago? Yep, got it. All my notebooks from college? Yep, got those too. Every bank statement, 401(k) form, and electric bill I’ve ever received? Well, at least the last 3 years’ worth. As one might imagine, organizing and storing all of this has gotten out of control. So I figured digitizing would be the perfect solution. I could still “keep” everything, but on disks (with backups) instead of filing cabinets.

I got this scanner on Friday afternoon; it’s now Monday morning. Over the weekend, this thing blew through about 4 1/2 filing cabinet drawers FULL of documents, several thousand pages of bound materials (I unbound and tossed the pages in), three 4-inch binders, and a bankers box full of notebooks. The speed on this thing is amazing, and the quality of the scan images far exceeded my expectations. At 20 ppm, I was hoping for legible. This gives me clear and detailed.

My only complaint with the scanner, and the reason I’m giving it 4 stars instead of 5, is that it jammed a LOT. Many of those jams I could chalk up to the quality of the paper, like thin pages or materials that were previously stapled and just kinda stuck in the feed. And sometimes it was a matter of trying to feed too much paper at once. However, a lot of it seemed to jam for no apparent reason. It seemed to have more trouble than necessary grabbing one sheet at a time, especially at the very beginning or end of a batch.

This scanner is definitely meant for documents. I did try scanning a couple of photos, tweaking the scanner settings to highest resolution with jpg file output. The images were pretty good, but not really high-res quality.

Even after reading all the reviews, I was really unsure as to how organization of all the scanned images would work. I was hoping that you could take a scan batch and then drag and drop pages or groups of pages into different folders, thereby creating different files. Not so. A batch will create one .pdf file.

If you want to combine or split files, you have to do that in Adobe, which is a little bit cumbersome (still easy, but more steps than drag-and-drop). It’s faster just to do a separate scan for each document or set of documents that you want to have as a single file.

A couple of things I LOVE about the scanner:

– Size: It looks big and cumbersome in the photo, like it would take up a bunch of room on your desk. But it’s really not. Folded up, the footprint is probably half the size of my MacBook Pro. And you don’t have to unfold the bottom catch tray in order to scan, just flip the top feed tray up and let the pages spit out onto your desk.

– Durability: I actually sort of dropped the scanner as I was pulling it out of the box. I’m clumsy. I figured it was toast. Nope, plugged it in and it worked just fine.

– Receipt Scanning: Oddly enough, one of the things this scanner handled exceptionally well was small receipts. Just to test the its capabilities, I threw in a stack of gas receipts (you know the tiny ones that are printed at the pump). I mixed the rotations, some long ways and some side ways, and they all scanned just fine. No jams, and the images all came out correctly rotated on the screen. It was pretty incredible.

When all is said and done, I expect to reduce my paper load from two 4-drawer filing cabinets, four bankers boxes, and about 10,000 pages of bound materials down to a single 2-drawer filing cabinet and a FreeAgent external hard drive. This is one of the best home-office machines I have ever used, and would highly recommend it for anyone who, like me, just can’t let go of all those documents!

I got my ScanSnap 2 weeks ago and have now scanned about 7,000 pages of docs. Although I feel it’s a flawed product, I think it’s still the best available that I’ve found.

GOOD:

* The hardware is really good at what it does: wicked fast, solid quality scanning. I can easily tear through 300-500 pages an evening.

* The hardware workflow deals efficiently with common problems, most notably, reliably detecting & helping you correct when a page misfeeds.

* It folds up into a small footprint on your desk.

NOT GOOD:

* Hardware build quality feels really cheap for a $450 device. Most notably, the paper feed gears are all plastic. Mine already broke in just the first 10 days requiring complete replacement of the scanner.

* It’s marketed as allowing up to 50 pages in the sheet feeder, my experience is that it typically can’t feed paper unless you go down to 15-20. When I try with more, it makes a horrible noise and jams up. (I’m pretty sure this is what broke the plastic gear.)

Finally, the mediocre software. Speaking as a usability engineer who has also worked in the Mac OS team at Apple, the software interface is remarkably disappointing, especially for a Mac OS app. Saddeningly, most of the kinds of problems I see are ones that could have been cumulatively fixed in just a few man-weeks of a good designer & engineer’s time. Here’s just a smattering:

* After the first two pages that you scan, the window focus returns to the scan progress dialog. In other words, if you start a scan and go do something else (like surfing the web), the first time you press the space bar or return key, your scan job is aborted without undo, since you’ve pushed the “Stop” button unwittingly.

* File names can’t be saved if you use characters prohibited on Windows (but not Mac). Worse, when you enter the name and it gives you an error (which gives factually incorrect criteria for what characters you can and can’t type — it keeps telling me I can’t enter characters that I know I didn’t), you lose the entire file name you chose and have to re-create it from scratch.

* The user interface text was clearly written by a non-native English speaker lacking usability or user assistance experience. Buttons and labels frequently even fail to conform to Apple’s own naming guidelines. Even though the concepts behind the software are simple, it’s often necessary to read the user manual to understand what different functions actually do, because the text labels are so poorly crafted, and rarely relate to the user task at hand. The error messages sometimes are just unbelievable — I’ve worked on the design and creation of consumer software for 16 years and I’ve *never* seen anything this sloppy.

* There’s so much low-hanging fruit that could make the software great: why can’t it automatically propose a file name based on the first few words of a scan? Why can’t the OCR take place in the background, so that you can get your scanning done and do the conversion overnight? (etc)

The documentation is also unbelievably bad: it’s not task-oriented, there’s factual mistakes where they copied and pasted out-of-date content from the prior model that doesn’t apply to the S1500M, it buries the most critical things you need to know in tangents, and is written for an era in which users read a multi-hundred page document from back to back. If I were still teaching undergraduate technical communication, I would use it with my students for comic relief.

All that said, this scanner has enabled me to reclaim my closet and I’m very grateful for it. But it’s far from a perfect product, and the flaws are ones that companies have no excuse for perpetuating at this price point, or in this era. Hopefully in 5 years there will be competitors that build fast scanners with reliable quality and well-crafted software — but this ain’t it.