Bought the Bundled version for a little more money which primary pays for the Rack2-File software which I haven’t used but at least it’s available.

Here’s the summary:

Pros:

– Relatively fast scanner.

– Compact size is good esp. when folded when not in use.

– Included ScanSnap management software is pretty good (but could be better).

– Can scan to pdf, other file formats, send to email or to printer (use scanner as a copier) and can scan photos (but you’ll need a color printer if you want to print them) 🙂

Cons:
– The plastic body makes it feel too flimsy/cheap!

– Relatively Loud/Noisy when scanning!!

– Must make sure papers aren’t wrinkled or have staple holes or it may jam during scanning.

– PDF editing uses Adobe Std 9 instead of included scan software.

– Outdated Adobe Acrobat Std. v9 is included and software upgrade is not available from Fujitsu! 🙁

– You’ll need (to buy) photo editing software if you want to edit the scanned photos!

Other thoughts:

– Relatively expensive but it pays itself off when you use it often

– It’s quicker than the older models which I’ve used

– Twain drivers are meant for networking and to make editing changes within the PDF without the need for 3rd party software like Adobe Acrobat but the included drivers for PC is basically fine

– If you want Twain drivers, then buy the next model UP which is meant for networks and includes Twain drivers. This model is meant for smaller offices and will suffice even if installed on a network and Adobe Acrobat must be used for any PDF editing. If you don’t edit that ofter or much, it’s Not that much of an issue.

– Paper jams will occur so you can’t just blame This particular model. The scan software will stop and ask you if you want to continue or delete the current scan if it jams so it’s not bad… you either rescan starting with where you left off or delete the current scan and start over. Sure, it’s a real pain when you have a massive scan job, then again, why do you have a big scan job instead of splitting it into different piles? All you have to do is wait then continue the other piles once the original piles have finished!

It’s a decent scanner for the price 🙂

I bought this scanner to functionally replace the scanner that is integrated into my multifunction printer. The printer’s scanner was okay as far as it goes, and gets good reviews by users, but it never quite lived up to my hopes and expectations. Two-sided scanning in particular was slow and unreliable.

I use the scanner for basically making my home filing paperless. Bills, statements, etc.
For me, speed and ease of use are the hopes that led me to buy the ScanSnap. I’m not speaking of speed strictly in terms of raw PPM scanning. Certainly the PPM affects overall speed, but start-to-finish time, which includes workflow and user interface elements – like the software, the need to babysit, how it handles double-sided scanning, the frequency of double-feeds, and double-feed handling when they do occur. 95% of my scanning is B&W. Everything ends up in PDFs. I store my scans in folders and I don’t like to keep them in a proprietary document management format.

Experience:
After using the scanner for 2 months, these are what I consider the important features and takeaways:

Initial impact: Upon opening the box, I was a bit shocked at just how small the scanner is. It is a bit like a transformer in this regard. To “transform” into a scanner, you flip open the top panel (which becomes the paper input tray), and optionally flip out the bottom panel (which becomes the paper output tray).

Once opened, a glowing blue Scan button is presented as the only electronic control on the whole device (its use is pretty obvious). That’s it. You flip the panels back and it transforms into a small toaster sized box. (If you don’t close it back up, the scanner will faintly flash at you when it goes to sleep – for me, the flash is mildly annoying at night, so I generally close it up, which basically turns it off.) The design is very impressive in its elegance and effectiveness. Grade: A+ (this is more coolness factor for me, but if you have limited desk space, it could be an important consideration)

Raw scan speed: Very fast. I have not timed it, but I can say that this fully meets (perhaps exceeds) my expectations and needs. Grade: A

Warm-up time: This is something that was kind of a drag with my MF printer. The first scan would require a minute or two of warm-up time before it would start scanning. For the SnapScan, the warm-up time is either zero, or if there is one it is less than 5 seconds. Grade: A+

Setup: In order to get the most out of the scanner, you may need to set up different profiles that correspond to different types of scanning that you do. Each profile can be associated with different settings (dpi, b&w vs. grayscale vs. color, two-sided, whether to OCR, where to store files, whether to send the scan to an outside application).

In practice, I find that 90%+ of my scanning uses a single profile: Scans to Adobe Acrobat (included), b&w, duplex (two-sided), ocr on, auto paper size detection. The remaining 10% is scanned to printer (basically, photocopy) and scan to email. It takes a bit of time to set this up (I got carried away when I first got it and set up too many profiles, several of which that have never been used). Anyway, it’s easy to do. I might recommend only building 1-4 profiles and then add as you see needs. Grade: A

Scan Reliability: Very few double-feeds. Every time there was a double-feed (maybe twice in the past 2 months), it detected it and provides clear prompts on how to recover. Very good and much better than my MF printer. Grade: A

Workflow: This is the guts of where I wanted to see improvement over my previous scanner. There are different ways one could engineer the workflow. This is how I do mine: I grab a big stack of “stuff” to scan (bills, statements, kid’s report cards, etc.) Some of it is two-sided, some of it isn’t – doesn’t matter. Some of it is letter sized, some of it is legal, some of it is 4″x6″, some of it is portrait, some of it is landscape – again, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that would lead me to make a separate pile is if it wasn’t for b&w scanning (very little of what I do).

I take the stack of papers, throw it on the scanner and hit Scan. I then walk away and let the scanner do its thing. Note that second-side scanning is completely automated, and it doesn’t have to reverse the page and rescan – it gets it all in one fell swoop. Very cool.

Because of how I configured it, a secondary OCR process automatically kicks in to make the PDFs searchable. If you don’t need that, turn off OCR and you won’t have time to walk away from the scanner unless you have a huge stack of material.

With this approach to workflow, everything is scanned into one big Adobe PDF in Acrobat. Click on the Page icon on the left side of the screen, and you will see mini version of each page in the PDF document. If there are any page 2s that you don’t want (often stray marks or unneeded text on the back of the page causes the page 2 scan to be retained when you don’t really need it), simply ctrl-click them in the page-icon panel and hit delete to remove them. Since I want to keep each scan in a separate file, I then ctrl-click each individual document in the page-icon panel and then right click to “Extract.” Tell it the name and location to save the PDF document, and cycle through until I’m done. (Tip: If you put into your paste-buffer the path of the location to save it can make this process faster.)

Workflow is significantly improved over my previous scanner. Being able to simply stack different documents together without regard to size, orientation, and two-sidedness is a huge time saver. Grade: A- (minus is because of OCR time; perhaps that is unfair to the scanner, but hey, I am a demanding consumer.

Overall, a highly satisfactory purchase. It’s unusual for me to be as pleased about a purchase as I am with this (that demanding consumer thing). My scanning gets done because it’s fast and it’s easy to do. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got.

For those of you looking for a batch family photo type scanner, this will do it. I had years of kid parties,vacations and Christmas pictures. In fact, I had no idea how many Kodak moments I had over the years. But the boxes filled up and they were moved from place to place without ever being opened. These photos were far from professional quality. Just the typical snapshot and I wanted to keep them. But I didn’t want to keep all the boxes that was taking up room in my house.

I took a chance that this might batch scan photos and it has! I have scanned now for days. The machine is quick and efficient. What has taken most of the time is I am organizing as I go. The trick is to buy their cleaner (smells like rubbing alcohol)and keep the scanner clean. It is a simple task really, once you get the hang of it. And it makes all the difference in the quality of scans.

I would say almost none of my pictures have the evil red and green streaks everyone talks about, although they will happen if the machine isn’t cleaned. Load up on microfiber cloths also as you don’t want to scratch the glass. And I try to give each photo a quick wipe front and back as I go.

Although I had saved to my computer and a external drive, I also bought a Clickfree auto backup and maybe will buy a second just for cheap insurance. I do have very old early 1900’s that I am scanning next. I’ve tried a few and it did a great job as expected. Memories are to valuable to lose. This is a wonderful investment, just what I was looking for, although I realize it is presented mostly as a document scanner.

Wow, how did I live without this thing!!! Paperless is THE way to go!

In about a week & 1/2, I have literally gotten rid of 98% of the paper in my home office & in my house. It’s such a great feeling, I can’t describe it!

I work out of house, plus I have my wife & kids stuff. I had bins & bins & bins of paper and TONS three ring notebooks that were kind of organized, but not really.

I originally wasn’t going to scan everything, but once I got started and once I saw how fast it was, I couldn’t stop….I would have scanned my cat if I could! hahaha!…I literally went through everything I could scan and I am so glad I did. Not only did I get rid of a ton of stuff, BUT having quick, instant computer access to all these papers has already helped me big time!

I’m so glad I read all the reviews on here and other sites, I knew I had thousands of paper that needed to be scanned and I wanted something that could handle it.

A few random notes…

1. I was honestly concerned about spending this type of money for a good scanner – I spent a few days reading reviews and looking into different products. Plus I have a scanner already in one of these Brother all-in-one units, but it takes for ever to scan, it doesn’t scan both sides and doesn’t handle bulk very well… This Scansnap is hands down worth the money! You won’t regret it!

2. 98% of the time nothing got stuck, when it did, I got nervous. But, it easy to just open it up and redo – I thought it would break, like the old scanners would, but this is definitely more heavy duty.

3. The software it comes with is great. I read some reviews where people didn’t like it, I don’t how it can get better or easier?

4. You have to clean the inside of the scanner once in a while especially if you are scanning all day! I used a clean cloth and just a touch of water.
5. It copies front and back and it is fast!!!

6. I had about 98% success rate with the copies being straight…even when using all different sizes of paper. The times it didn’t work were mostly issues with old paper or forgetting to remove staples. Very brittle receipts don’t go through so use sheet protector.

7. I love that comes with a sheet protector that will protect documents that are older. I didn’t read that in any reviews… great for old newspaper articles, etc.

8. I scanned everything as a searchable PDF except pictures – pictures I saved for last so I wouldn’t have to change setting.

9. Once everything is scanned then you can go back and name the files and put into folders…that also took some time, but again totally worth it… you don’t have to get to too crazy though because of the search function. Once it is scanned you can easily find it FAST!

10. I have almost 4 Gig of Scans, probably some people will have more, but it handled it all!

11. Now when I get mail or school papers,or work related stuff, I open up Scansnap, it automatically turns on and I scan what i need and throw out the rest, and backup right away. within a few minutes, done! I have 4 nice big files cabinets that I used to keep current stuff or articles I wanted to read, now they are used for non-paper storage!

12. BACKUP PLAN! If you are going to scan all your stuff, come up with a backup plan!… this is what I did.. I bought 3 – 2TB hard drives – 2 are always plugged into computer and I put one in a fireproof safe ($80 bucks from Office Depot or Amazon) in my basement, then I purchased an online backup plan (Online Storage Solutions – very inexpensive, unlimited storage,

& easy to use!). Yeah, it takes forever to upload your documents but when you do, you are set… plus the files are on my computer too… once this was all set, I got rid 98% of the paper in my house! In the fire safe, I put a few papers I didn’t want to throw out, original birth certificates and a few things I didn’t want to lose. I also kept a couple of bins of kids art work and other stuff that meant a lot to us.

I don’t want to sound to dramatic, but I read on some reviews that people felt like a huge load was lifted after scanning everything and going virtually paperless. I feel more organized and on top of everything, I have virtually no paper on my desk.

One last thing – since getting this, I have since went ALL DIGITAL – old family movies, old cassette tapes, all DVDs, all my music, old pictures, all work related stuff, all contacts, all contact management – it has all taken time, but now everything is digital and backed up…so I have less crap and more piece of mind. Still can’t scan and backup my cat, though!

I have instantly found stuff I needed and that has saved time…it feels great to know that all these documents are scanned & backed up!

Our office has dozens of HP Scanjets and Xerox Documates and, as the IT guy, I hate every one. Feeders wear out, get jammed, pull multiple pages through, and are slow. I decided to go with the Fujistu ScanSnap because of all the great reviews, despite the higher price. Our budget doesn’t allow for a copier scanner or a high priced workstation scanner. For the price, the ScanSnap is excellent.

1. This scanner is very small. It is only slightly wider than a letter-sized sheet of paper, and when everything is folded up, it is half as long. Unlike other scanners, I can easily find room for it at any desk in our office. It is so small it could even sit on top of a workstation.

2. This scanner is VERY easy to use. Previous scanners had buttons all over them for different functions. You would press the regular scan button, and then have to wait for the scanner’s software to start up, the lamp to warm up, the image to preview (I HATE previewing the image!), and the slow process of scanning.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap has two buttons. A power button (which I never use since I leave the unit on all the time) and a big green SCAN button. Put the paper in, press the button, and literally within about 5 seconds it scans the image, and in another 3 or 4 it converts it to PDF and saves it. It is amazing how insanely fast this scanner is.

3. The Software provided by Fujitsu is great. It is very unobtrusive and easy to use. I scan most of my docs to PDF, so after it is done scanning, I just use their included software, which shows previews of the actual scans. I can click an “e-mail” button and 2 seconds later it opens my email program with the scan already attached. MUCH faster than scanning directly from Acrobat. It’s also great that I can use their software standalone and don’t have to deal with Acrobat at all, which is incredibly bloated in version 7.

It comes with some other software, such as an OCR reader which I haven’t tried, and a program called CardMinder which you can use to scan in business cards. It will scan the card, use the OCR reader to categorize the contact information, as well as save an actual image of the card. I don’t use this program either but it definitely seems useful for people who receive a lot of cards. It also comes with Acrobat Standard 7.0 so you don’t have to buy Adobe’s software.

This might be the best piece of office equipment I’ve purchased. If you are looking for a powerful scanner at a mid-range price it is great, and I definitely recommend it for anyone who does a lot of scanning to PDF. It is worth the extra $250 or so compared to the HP scanners simply for the copy of Acrobat and the speed of use.

The differences between the S1500 and its predecessor, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500 Clr 18PPM/36IPM Dupl Scanner, are:

1. The S1500 is slightly faster at scanning, and the software seems to be a little faster at processing the documents. Given that the S500 was fast to begin with, the increase is barely noticeable.

2. Form factor – The S1500 has straighter lines and looks more modern while the S500 is a little more rounded. The differences are pretty dramatic and I probably prefer the S1500 more.

3. The S1500 comes bundled with a newer version of ScanSnap Manager. That’s somewhat significant because it is pretty difficult to obtain the software/drivers if you don’t have the disc it came with. You can’t just go on Fujitsu’s site and download it, you have to actually contact them and give them your model number, and then they give you an FTP site to obtain the software. So don’t lose your discs. It also comes with Acrobat Standard 9. The Acrobat software is terrible, but it is a little better than the Acrobat Standard 8 that comes bundled with the S500.

Overall, I do think they improved a bit on the S500, but not enough where anyone needs to replace their S500 with the S1500.

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.

I repeated this process with any papers I could get my hands on. I even tried sticking in papers of varying sizes, and it sped through them all without a problem. I am officially hooked. (In a moment of either stupidity or genius, I sliced the spine off of an old book and scanned that in too.)

I did notice a few things that are worth mentioning specifically:

1) This scanner is much smaller than it looks. I was expecting something the size of a inkjet printer, but it is actually about the size of a loaf of bread.

2) You have to place the papers GENTLY into the scanner or it will jam. If I push the papers in too far, it pulls through several pages at a time and the software warns you to start over.

3) I am running the software on Windows 7 RC1, so I can tell you that, at least in my case, it will work on Win7.