Does the ScanSnap S1500M Succeed or Fail?

Read my in-depth review below to see if Fujitsu deliver with their latest scanner…

When I was searching for a new AIO, or All In One, scanner, I was reading all the reviews, as you do, and I came across a story that clinched the deal. This guy had recieved a document from an “ignorant” clerk at the IRS, riddled with staples. He removed all the staples, or so he thought, and ran it through his newly acquired ScanSnap S1500M. To his horror, there came a crunching sound, and he realised he had missed some staples. For your average scanner,  that would mean certain death, or an expensive trip to the repair man. Yet this poor guy’s scanner just went straight back to action, as though nothing had happened. After reading that little tale, I needed no more persuading to get my own ScanSnap S1500M. Clearly here was a machine that could be relied upon…

ScanSnap is capable of scanning 20 pages per minute, whether in color, grayscale or black and white.

One of the main selling points from Fujitsu is that “scans look there best without operator intervention before or after they scan”. This bold promise is backed up by a number of features:

• Auto color, black and white, and grayscale detection
• Auto page size detection
• Auto crop and de-skew (ie no lop-sided or wonky pages)
• Auto content based rotation (basically means your pages come out the right way up)
• Auto quality (picks out small things like receipts in amongst bigger documents, and changes the scan resolution to make the small print readable)
• Convert scattered paper documents, such as invoices, into a single, searchable pdf file.

The bundle includes the “ABBYY Fine Reader”. This nifty software will convert any printed document into a Microsoft Word or Excel file, at the touch of a button – no need to waste hours typing!

If you have lost track of your business cards, why not have ScanSnap archive them  in your PC’s address book, or iPhone. The scanner bundle includes the software (Cardiris 3.6), to make the conversion to searchable PDF, Word, Excel, email attatchment, address book, or VCF contacts.

Compared to other “all in one” scanners, paper handling errors are remarkably rare. If you do happen to get a skipped page, the sensor light warns you, and even lets you know which page is missing.

Throw any type of paper at it – legal, letters, cards, newspaper clippings, etc – and it still performs. It’s only jammed once on me, and that was because I forgot to use the carrier sheet to insert my crumpled magazine page. It’s was a relief to discover that clearing a jam is no big deal either. There was a few complaints about it jamming with thin paper. But I suspect folks who were having such issues, didn’t realise they should use the carrier sheet with newspaper-thin documents, for the best result. If you treat the machine nicely, it will treat you nicely back! Most reviewers were impressed that the scanner DID NOT suffer from regular jamming problems.

Scanners that make a lot of noise get on my nerves. Thankfully this one is on the quiet side.

Some pictures I looked at before buying ScanSnap made it look fairly bulky, and I almost had second thoughts. However, I took the plunge and when it arrived I thought they had sent the wrong scanner because it looked so small. It also folds down if you want to tuck it away for a while – great for a small office space. It’s about as big as your average shoe box when closed up, and opens up to full operating size with a few simple hand movements.

It scans both sides of a page automatically, so you don’t have to go through that tedious page-flipping routine!

It’s not that expensive, and they throw in Adobe Acrobat Pro Version, which would cost you $200 plus, if you had to buy it seperately. That’s a good deal, and armed with Acrobat you can live the paperless dream! by converting all your documents to PDF format, stored on your computer. What’s more Adobe’s software lets you add signatures, insert pages, make sticky notes and more. I can’t put it any better than this guy: “If you do the math they are either giving the scanner away or giving the software away”(Amazon customer review). If purchased separately, all the bundled software would cost more than the scanner, so it’s quite a bargain.

If you need to batch-scan different sorts and sizes of paper all at one go, you will be pleased that Fujitsu included “Organizer” software, to make the process a lot easier and convenient. For example, you could scan bank statements, bills and receipts altogether in a bundle, and then neatly tuck them away in a computer folder. Pretty sweet!

Note that the “Organizer” software is only available for computers with Microsoft Windows installed. Fear not though all you Mac lovers – there is a great piece of software called “Yep” that you can download online. It does everything that the Windows organizer does and then some. The full version costs only $34, and is well worth it. Google “yep mac software” to find out more.

The ScanSnap is a powerful all-in-one solution, yet is surprisingly uncomplicated to operate. As one reviewer put it: “it is like the porridge in the Goldilocks story: just right”.

I’m the kind of guy that will put documents into a scanner upside down or the wrong way around. So I appreciated the “auto rotate” feature which corrects this for me. I can load a bunch of different documents, and press a single button, and hey presto, a new pdf file appears on my computer. What’s more the pages of the pdf have been straightened out for me, and totally slant-free. And each scanned document is the correct size – it hasn’t been warped.

The ability to scan front and back at the same time is worth the money on it’s own, as far as I’m concerned. The really neat thing is, it won’t scan the back page if it’s blank.

The smart Fujitsu software will help you resume a scan if it is interrupted for some reason – ie power cut. So if you’re half way through a 50 page scan, there’s no need to go all the way back to the beginning.

The scan quality is truly outstanding. Photos come out as good as the real thing, if not better. I think this reviewer was a little impressed: “It’s so good it scans the backside, mirror image of very thin gas receipts, go figure”.

If you’ve used scanners before that feed in pages, you’ll know what a pain it is when the device gets greedy and tries to suck up several pages together. This is no longer such a headache thanks to the ScanSnap’s sensor, that stops the scan job if more than one page is fed in at a time. When you resume the job, you can scan into the same document, as though nothing bad had happened.

You can easily set up scanning profiles. Say that I want to repeat a certain scan job, with my custom settings, in future. I can save that scan as a profile, and select it with 2 clicks next time.

I have a home office that used to be cluttered by 4-drawer filing cabinets and bankers boxes. Thanks to ScanSnap I have reduced thousands of pages down to a single filing cabinet and an external hard drive.

What Do Customers Say About It?

As you’d expect, this product has an Average Customer Rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com. Here are some of the specific ratings, with the number of customers in parenthesis or brackets:

Ease of use: 4.8 out of 5 (298)
Small size: 4.8 out of 5 (287)
Scan speed: 4.9 out of 5 (272)
Scan quality: 4.9 out of 5 (267)

If you need any more persuading, try these quotes from the hundreds of Amazon.com customers who gave the S1500M a thumbs up:

• I realised instantly that this was the holy grail of scanners.
• Every one of these scanners has been a model of reliability. I’ve recommended these scanners to hundreds of people and every single person I’ve recommended it to has wound up falling in love with it.
• As a home scanner there is simply no other option. The all-in-one machines are fine if you only want to scan a few things here and there. If you are going to scan stacks of documents then you need a real scanner like this one.
• A couple of lawyers I know work in small firms where this is the only scanner. It can totally handle the workflow of paper that a small firm of lawyers recieves.
• The paperless revolution awaits you…
• This product is easy to use, produces scans with great clarity in the blink of an eye, and has not had as much as a hiccup with 10,000 pages done.
• I have scanned over 900 documents in the past week without any jams or software hangups.
• This is one of the rare devices that makes me say “Gee whiz, isn’t technology great.
• I’ve never felt compelled to write a review for anything I’ve purchased on Amazon until now. This is an exceptional product.
• Within 5 minutes of recieving it I had installed the software.
• In short this scanner seems to fix every single gripe I’ve had about every other scanner I’ve ever used.
• Just to test it’s 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.
• I don’t spend so much time babysitting the scanning process as I used to.
• Even my fourth grade students can scan, download documents into the proper file, transfer the contents into a travel drive, and then load the contents on the computers of the other teachers in mere minutes!! They love using the ScanSnap, as does their teacher!!