Product: ScanSnap S1300
Manufacturer: Fujitsu
Wired Rating: 6
SCANNER ROUNDUP
Are you a paper hater? A new crop of portable, USB-powered scanners can convert the mess on your desk from a dusty collection of dead trees into pure clean electronics.
SCANNER ROUNDUP
Are you a paper hater? A new crop of portable, USB-powered scanners can convert the mess on your desk from a dusty collection of dead trees into pure clean electronics.
If quality is your concern, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 is your portable scanner of choice: It produced the clearest, best-looking images of the scanners we tested, largely thanks to its big, solid document feeder, which holds up to 10 pages. That means pages go in straighter, which also helps keep the scans looking good.
When it did get hung up (on a wrinkled sheet torn from a legal pad) it was easy to open the ScanSnap and clear the jam.
Fujitsu has been touting its scanners as especially Evernote-friendly, which is a boon for users of the increasingly popular note management software. In fact, you can get a discount on Evernote Premium when you buy a ScanSnap. However, setting up the scanner and getting it to work with Evernote was a bit complicated. After installing the software from the provided DVD (it takes up more than 1 GB of hard drive space), you need to do some manual adjustment of various settings before it will sync with Evernote.
The ScanSnap comes with OCR software for turning scanned images into text and data, and can also generate Word or Excel documents from scanned pages.
If you’re truly serious about quality, speedy scanning, you might look to the S1300’s bigger brother, the S1500: a desktop model that can digitize big sheafs of paper at about three seconds per page.
WIRED Delivers crisp, clear images. 10-sheet document feeder keeps pages straighter than other scanners. Easy to clear jams when they do happen. Software supports scanning to PDF, Word documents, and other formats. Reasonably quick at 10 seconds per page.
TIRED The largest of the scanners we tested. Bloated software suite takes over 1 GB of hard drive space. Requires a series of manual steps to get working with Evernote.