I’ve been wanting to go paperless in my personal life for some time, but it took a business requirement to push me over the edge. Previously I used my client’s high volume, high speed, copier/scanner to archive documents and to create PDFs for email, etc. I have a flatbed scanner at home, a $100 HP POS that I got for free when I bought my Mac. Scanning documents on a flatbed scanner was extremely time consuming and frustrating. Ultimately my requirements included, multi-page sheet feeder…and portable. I need to have a scanner at my client sites whether they have a high speed copier/scanner or not. I also wanted color, but it wasn’t a requirement.
So the search was on. The March, 2010 edition of Macworld included a review of Scanners (find it here: Macworld Scanner Review – 3-1-10) [I couldn't find the article online...why Macworld?...so I scanned it with the S1300 to a PDF]. I wasn’t in the market for a $500 scanner (ie Fujitsu S1500M), I wanted a mid $200 scanner. Then, at Macworld 2010, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 was announced to great fan fare (example here). I bought it for $249.
The ScanSnap came out of the box pretty much as expected. Its small size makes it easily portable, and although slower than its big brother the S1500M, it handles multiple duplex scanning, in color, and in a timely manner. I bought a neoprene case for it at the Fujitsu website (here). Its marketed as a case for the S300, but works just fine with the S1300. The cords fold up in a compartment below the scanner and it all fits in my larger messenger bag (doesn’t fit in a standard laptop bag due to its width).
The S1300 scanner comes with drivers and software, but the software really isn’t geared towards a paperless office. I’ll write a followup post about my paperless office software. Instead, the included software allows you to easily create scanner profiles that can be saved and easily clicked to activate. The software also allows you to save to a variety of formats and destinations. I have it setup to automatically scan duplex to my paperless office software (config in followup post). Note, Adobe Acrobat does not come with this scanner. I already have Adobe CS4, so no worries there.
Satisfaction with any piece of technology depends on what you are used to. The S1300 isn’t as fast as my client’s big copier/scanner that schwap, schwap, schwap scans everything and sends it to my email. Nor is it as fast as the S1500M and it doesn’t have the same sheet capacity. So from that perspective, the S1300 felt like a downgrade. However, the portability and excellent scanning quality more than made up for its slower speed and smaller capacity. If you haven’t used a high powered (and expensive) sheetfed scanner, you will be rightly impressed with the S1300.