Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I purchased this scanner to improve the operation of my CPA office (consulting/audit practice), and to get rid of a good part of (roughly 40 crates of) files I have accumulated over my career. Before making this purchase I reviewed the CPA Computer report Accountants Guide to Going Paperless, the AICPA IT section whitepapers, I attended a few paperless workshops, and I read Amazon reviews of earlier Fujitsu products and Visioneer products. My unit serial number was #5XX, so mine is one of the first of this model sold. This review is based on only one week of experience using the S500, but I think it is better to share this information now than to wait until I have more to report.
The S500 appears to be similar to the previous model the FI5110EOX2 which has been heavily, and positively, reviewed on Amazon and also in the references listed above. Differences between the S500 and the earlier 5110 are as follows -
* Integration with ABBY OCR, so the S500 can produce searchable PDF's and other formats!!! This was a major limitation with the 5110EOX2 which could only produce graphic PDFs. The ABBY OCR is not perfect, but hopefully gets enough keywords right to make the document findable.
* One touch scan to PDF, to Word, to Excel, to Power Point, to ScanSnap Organizer (which produces searchable PDFs), and to Cardminder (for business cards).
* Inclusion of Adobe Acrobat 7.0!
* 20% improved scan speed (up to 16 pages per minute, with a 50 page feed bin), and the ability to append consecutive batches to the same PDF file. In practice I think I will often be using highest resolution (Excellent, 1200dpi/600dpicolor) mode with max compression, which is significantly slower - about 25sec/page scan time and 10sec/page OCR time on my new Compaq presario laptop. The lower resolution modes (going down to Fastest, 300dpi/150dpicolor) might be sufficient for older print documents without marks or illustrations, that do not have much value to me, that I doubt I will ever look at again but can't just toss.
* Automatic document size detection so you can feed batches of mixed size documents. (plus all the document handling features from the 5110, including reasonably good automatic handling of mixed single sided and double sided documents)
* File compression which is claimed to reduce file sizes 20-50 percent.
* A significant cash manufacturers [censored] for purchases from authorized dealers is currently available for this product through the Fujitsu website.
Here are the limitations I have seen with this scanner so far (4000 scans of documents and business cards) -
* It sometimes feeds two sheets at once, most often the first two sheets in a batch, so I will have to keep my eye on the first sheets it feeds. If the documents have page numbers it will be easy to know how many documents I have fed and compare this with the scanner count. If the documents do not have page numbers I will need to count them by hand, or keep I very close eye on the scanner throughout the scan, or just live with a very occasional missed page due to the mechanism feeding two sheets at once.
* I assume staples will damage the mechanism, and so I will have to carefully inspect all documents for staples before scanning.
* The OCR is alright but not perfect. There are frequent OCR mistakes when scanning business cards, and several mistakes per page on spreadsheets (7's sometimes become 1's, 5's sometimes become S's, 0's sometimes become O's, missing decimal points, extra junk characters etc). White text on black background and black text on grey background have poor results. Fortunately the graphic image is retained in the searchable PDF, and is also retained in Cardminder, so that even when the OCR is not perfect I can still see what the original looked like.
* If a spreadsheet had relationships between the columns, I can recalculate the relationship and compare my recalculation with the scanned information, which seems to detect almost all errors in scans to Excel.
* Scan to Word often results in a slightly different format or positioning of text than the original document.
* The scanner does not support TWAIN (a uniform driver interface for scanners), instead it has a proprietary interface. Based on my research, the proprietary interface is better than TWAIN, so if the included software meets your needs then this is not a limitation. However if you absolutely must use some 3rd party software that requires TWAIN then you should not buy this scanner!
* The PDF files produced by the system are not fully compressed, even with maximum compression selected. Running PKZIP does not increase the compression significantly, however in Adobe 7.0 I click File | Reduce File Size | For Adobe 7.0 and subsequent, and files compress perhaps by up to 80% ! This additional Adobe compression claims to have no loss of visual quality and is fast for PDFs of a few megabytes, but quite slow for huge PDFs, and seems to produce much more additional compression on high resolution scans than on low resolution scans. Why can't Fujitsu/Abby use this Adobe 7.0 super compressed mode to begin with or add it to their batch process manager? I have not figured out how to get the system to reduce this annoying extra process step.
* After installing the scanner, Outlook caused my XP system to hang three times a day with a fatal "STOP ERROR" causing a blue screen and a reboot. I called tech support, and found it very easy to reach a live person who listened to me sympathetically and had some useful troubleshooting information, but did not have an immediate fix and took me down a few false paths. Microsoft crash analysis was worse than useless and incorrectly concluded that the problem was in my graphics driver which was not the case. In the end, through trial and error, I diagnosed the problem myself. It turned out that the Blue Soleil bluetooth USB wireless networking drivers installed in my system and plugged into Outlook were incompatible with something in the S500 package, perhaps with the S500 drivers or the Adobe 7.0 Outlook plugin. Uninstalling Blue Soleil caused the problem to go away completely.
* Every now and then (2%?) of scans, when I press the green scan button or when I click continue in the scansnap manager window, the image scanning and file saving window comes up on my screen, but the feed motor never starts turning. The system appears locked up, and the only way to reliably start scanning again seems to be to disconnect and reconnect the power plug on the back of the scanner.
* When scanning paper that is rough or perforated, sometimes the ejecting page will push the previously scanned page out of its neat stack in the output pile, and in the worst case spill several pages from the output pile onto the floor! I have learned to place the scanner at the rear of a deep desk, and to set a block at the front of the desk at the front end of output pile to push back against any paper that tries to fall out.
* I was able to use the software to convert some previously scanned graphic PDFs to searchable PDF's, however the Abby manual does claim that only files produced by ScanSnap are supported (though I suppose one could always print a hardcopy and then scan it again using ScanSnap).
Despite the problems listed above, this system is helping me better communicate with my clients, and in the long term I think it will significantly reduce the clutter in my office.
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The ScanSnap S500 is a complete Office Solution designed to improve your productivity and to solve your office scanning problems. Turn Images on paper into PDFs You can turn the documents that clutter up your desktop into PDFs, and manage and archive them on your computer. You can use the Adobe Acrobat software package with this scanner to display these PDF documents. ScanSnap product can also automatically recognize the type of documents, color or black & white so scanned image files can be made smaller when scanning documents containing a mixture of color and black & white pages. You can also have the scanner automatically remove blank pages in documents in order to reduce the size of files even more.
Scan 18 double-sided pages per minute In one step, the ScanSnap S500 digitizes both sides of a document in a single pass, in color, and at an amazing speed of up to 18 pages per minute.
Advanced features for the ultimate ease of use With a touch of the button the ScanSnap enhances the user experience with a host of automatic features, including:
Auto paper size detectionScan mixed batches of documents containing paper ranging in size from business cards to legal sized documents
Auto de-skew Automatically straightens and aligns text and images into their correct orientation
Auto blank page deletion Save storage space and eliminate the need to edit scanned documents with the ScanSnap's ability to recognize and delete blank pages
Instantly create searchable PDF files The included "ScanSnap Organizer" automatically converts scanned data into searchable PDF files, while the ScanSnap S500's image enhancement technology increases character recognition for more precise OCR accuracy.
Scan directly to Microsoft Office ApplicationsThe bundled ABBYY FineReader enables the user to scan documents directly to applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Quickly organize business card information Scan business cards directly to your contacts database with the included CardMinder application. CardMinder captures information written in 7 languages from scanned business card images and stores this information in an easily accessible format.
Simple installation and operation in a compact design The ScanSnap easily installs via its USB 2.0 interface and its small footprint requires less space than a letter size piece of paper.
What's in the box ScanSnap S500, power cord, USB cable, software includes: full standard version of Adobe Acrobat 7.0, CardMinder 3.0 Business Card Software, and ScanSnap Organizer V 3.0 Software, set up disc, getting started guide and operator's manual
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