Rating: 
Summary: For document scanning it's a champ!
Review: Get this for document scanning. That's what it was designed for. And it is hands down the best solution.I was wasting precious time with a flatbed, and found the sheetfed scanners that bend the paper around to be lacking in many ways. "Real" document scanners were priced in the thousands, and used SCSI - something my laptop was not designed for. Then I discovered this gem... Fujitsu seems to have taken their pricy straight-path document scanners and created a more affordable (but not cheap) entry level USB based document scanner that meets my needs perfectly. I've had this machine for less than a week but it was more than enough time to give it a workout. It's even small enough to take with me, so I brought it to a client's home to scan their documents for a refinance. It handled almost every piece of paper I put in it. While it had a tendency to feed multiple pages of some extra-bright paper I had just printed on, I could manually feed the pages a few at a time (wife says just buy cheaper paper) to avoid jams. It even scans checks and business cards. It does a great job on the documents I work with, creating Acrobat PDFs that are compact. It is fast and quiet. Did I mention it can scan both sides of the page at once? It also automatically detects paper size and color so that the documents are scanned at the correct settings. It comes with a full version of Acrobat 5.0.5, and CardMinder for scanning business cards. Just put up to 50 pages in the feeder, press a button, and it goes to work at about 15 pages per minute. If you need to scan and archive documents for your business, get one of these. It ia a bit pricier than other scanners, has no bells and whistles (aside from the bundled software), and not intended for photos, but for my needs, worth the bucks in time savings alone.
Rating:
Summary: For document scanning it's a champ!
Review: Get this for document scanning. That's what it was designed for. And it is hands down the best solution. I was wasting precious time with a flatbed, and found the sheetfed scanners that bend the paper around to be lacking in many ways. "Real" document scanners were priced in the thousands, and used SCSI - something my laptop was not designed for. Then I discovered this gem... Fujitsu seems to have taken their pricy straight-path document scanners and created a more affordable (but not cheap) entry level USB based document scanner that meets my needs perfectly. I've had this machine for less than a week but it was more than enough time to give it a workout. It's even small enough to take with me, so I brought it to a client's home to scan their documents for a refinance. It handled almost every piece of paper I put in it. While it had a tendency to feed multiple pages of some extra-bright paper I had just printed on, I could manually feed the pages a few at a time (wife says just buy cheaper paper) to avoid jams. It even scans checks and business cards. It does a great job on the documents I work with, creating Acrobat PDFs that are compact. It is fast and quiet. Did I mention it can scan both sides of the page at once? It also automatically detects paper size and color so that the documents are scanned at the correct settings. It comes with a full version of Acrobat 5.0.5, and CardMinder for scanning business cards. Just put up to 50 pages in the feeder, press a button, and it goes to work at about 15 pages per minute. If you need to scan and archive documents for your business, get one of these. It ia a bit pricier than other scanners, has no bells and whistles (aside from the bundled software), and not intended for photos, but for my needs, worth the bucks in time savings alone.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Defective Machine
Review: Having scanned more than 40,000 pages, I would say I am an expert at using this finicky, difficult, tempermental and basically flawed piece of hardware. The quality of the PDFs is very good, both black and white and color. So it does work. However, the problem is with the roller and "grabber" assembly. Simply, it will pull, at its own discretion, 2, 8 or 10 pages at once! If you are scanning stacks of documents, which I do, you will have to have them all checked for missed pages (i.e. pages that were pulled together) and then redo these, to be added to your document later. You will also clear frequent scans, no matter have carefully and precisely you feed new stacks of sheets. I could write a fair size manual on how to try and feed pages and the compelx ins and outs of MINIMIZING jams (since you will NOT prevent them). I have used every kind and size of paper, from very rough to shiny, from photocopies to high quality printed color materia and there are jams, regardless. Preping the pages, by shuffling them around so they do not stick, has a minimal effect. You WILL be frustrated and driven to the limit of patience by this poorly designed scanner, which should have had DOUBLE roller. Because of the single roller affair, you also get skewed sheets, no matter how perfectly square and aligned they are in the machine (Fujitsu's web site lies about this, blaming the user). The engineer who designed the roller system should be fired and Fujitusu should reimburse users at least half the price-after honestly disclosing how horrific the product is to use. Hours and hours of wasted time and energy. Still, it is the ONLY such scanner in its price, though I think Canon is now coming out with a rival.. That would be good.
I find it very, very, very hard to believe the 4 or 5 star ratings I found here are written by actual users and not Fujitsu empolyees or resellers. The ONLY way one would be satisfied with this machine is if the pages are hand fed, one by one, for double sided copying.
If there are no competitors, and you can get this machine cheap, and have profound patience and a meditative mind, possibly consider it. If ANY competing device comes into existance, avoid this like the plague.
Rating:
Summary: Best Document Scanner for the Money!
Review: I was hesitant to purchase this scanner after reading the one review which criticized the software driver provided with the Scansnap. I too was concerned over the lack of a twain driver. After careful review and actual scanner use, however, I find that this is not an obstacle to performing functions such as OCR, etc. Since the Scansnap scans to PDF format (it comes with the full version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0), it is extremely easy to import the PDF format to Paperport or Omni Page. Omni page 12.0 does an excellent job of OCR on PDF documents. Paperport 9.0, moreover, now uses PDF as its default scanning format so the transition is seamless. Furthermore, through a simple change in the scansnap software, scansnap will automatically open and scan to paperport, or any other PDF or JPG compatible software program. As for mechanics of scanner operation, what can I say? The Scansnap is lightening fast. Shortly after setting up the scanner, I took a practice run and scanned in a stack of bills, receipts, and statements that were hanging around waiting for more traditional filing arrangements. To my astonishment, I was done in no time. If you want to see for yourself, go to the Fujitsu web site to see a video streamer of just how quickly this little wonder machine works. I can verify that it works as fast as the demo. Like another reviewer, I was delighted to throw away paperwork that usually sits in piles for eternity, and then some. If you have any doubt about flexibility of this scanner, don't. It's simply as good as it gets for the price range. And I've looked at quite a few machines. If you want to have a truly paperless office, BUY THIS MACHINE! 10/12/03- The reviewer who gave a 2-star (above) simply needs to adjust snap scan settings. Further, I have not any problems with the document feed. He may not be loading properly or simply has a machine that requires adjustment or repair. That happens. As for a twain driver, if the goal is document scanning, who needs it? I have not confronted any limitations due to absence of twain driver. Let's face it, there is no other scanner out there at this price that even comes close to the quality and capability of snapscan.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice scanner, with some quibbles
Review: I've used this scanner for about 3 months. I'm an MBA student and I use it to scan all my readings and cases so I can have them handy. I've scanned a lot of paper in a short time so have come across the good and the bad. It can scan very fast but this is only on the lowest quality setting. If you are just archiving documents then this is fine but if you're going to OCR you need to set it at the highest quality which slows it down quite a lot. Otherwise you will get a lot of OCR errors and waste a lot of time correcting them. For archiving bills and other papers I try to stick with medium scan quality. The duplex scan with blank page removal and automatic color detection works great, saves a lot of time compared with a classmate's HP sheetfed scanner. Papers very occasionaly double feed. Has happened like 3 or 4 times since I've had it. The software can detect misfeeds because the paper will appear to be longer than it's supposed to be. You can just pull out the offending papers, restack them and continue the scan. Software interface is below average. It's supposed to be able to launch an external application and pass it the PDF file. I've never been able to get it to do this except with Acrobat. Can't believe this doesn't work properly. Also it's supposed to scan to jpeg but this option does not exist in my software! No big deal but makes me wonder. Hardware quality is average. Yes, it's plastic and doesn't seem to be worth what you paid from a build quality standpoint. The output tray is very poorly integrated with the rest of the unit. The nicest thing is that its footprint is very small. Fits well on my small office desk. I think they were cheap when they designed it since there is only one roller to draw papers into the scanner. This roller is located in the middle of the feedtray. The problem I find is that it almost never ever draws in my papers completely straight. If they had used several rollers this would not happen. Most my scans come out slightly skewed. But after OCR it dissapears. Color seems slightly darker than originals. Color saturation changes according to scan resolution too. Card scanner software works fine the one time I used it. Other people complain about TWAIN. Yes, this would be nice but not a deal killer for me. Autorotates pages which is very cool and unexpected. But occasionally gets it wrong and you have to fix it manually. Not very noisy while scanning. None of the other people in the office have complained at least and I can work while scanning without being annoyed. The scan light blinks on and off occasionally when it's standing by, this is slightly annoying as you can see the light reflecting off the desktop.
Rating: 
Summary: Good hardware, poor software
Review: The hardware works great: it's very fast and the scans look fine. I've not had any problems with misfeeding or double feeding. What stinks is the software: paper sizes for a start. When set to auto-detect paper size, the printer guesses the width of your paper on the basis of its length and the range of built-in paper sizes (Letter, A4 etc.) This means the edges are chopped off any sheet whose aspect ratio is wider than letter size (e.g., yes, Verizon bills). And yes, there is a custom size option, but only one! And you have to manually select it each time you scan something that size, there's no way to add that size as an option for auto-detect. So essentially it's totally useless for scanning a pile of oddly-sized pieces of paper (you have feed different sizes separately anyway). Lack of a Twain driver is a killer for the following reason: sure, you can set the program to import all your scanned PDFs into PaperPort, but you can't *do* anything with them in PaperPort: you can't use any of Paperport's tools on each file without manually converting it to another format, which of course you can only do a file at a time, manually. All you can do in PaperPort is file your scans, but you can use Windows Explorer to do that. I used to get an error where the software would crash "while performing automatic blank page removal". The only fix is to restart your PC. Unfortunately the error *still occurred* when the option for automatic blank page removal was turned off! This has stopped happening now. Now I get another problem however: when first using the scanner after it has been disconnected from the USB port and reconnected, the scanner seems to take a long time to recalibrate itself, and the first few pages are scanned terribly badly: purple stripes down the pages and the image horribly out of focus. This product is usable, but could be so much better if they added a twain driver so you aren't locked into their awful software.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: The scan width is 8.5 inches. It will not do letters sideways but otherwise it is fine (unlike what some poster said). It doesn't do greyscale. Only B/W and color. It doesn't do photos well. Photo paper attract paper dust (from your other scannings) and you get white spots. This machine is for converting bills and records into pdf quickly. 400 dpi at 10 ppm and 600 dpi are usable - not that much slower for me. For scanning pictures and greyscale, you will need to buy a $80 flatbed scanner. This is a specialized machine, it does not do everything. The rated 15 ppm is for 11 inch pages. If you are scanning short paper (checks for example) it is faster. My checks scan at 60 checks per minute. I love my machine for what it does. If you wanted the machine for something other than scanning into a pdf (B/W or color), you will be disappointed. For what it does, it is beautiful. I haven't checked out the OCR capabilities. I think Acrobat will do it. Frankly, I don't need to OCR my bills and I never use it.
Rating:
Summary: Nice scanner, with some quibbles
Review: This machine has tremendous trouble with feeding. One third of the time I get a double feed which means that I have to rescan the whole stack. Also, when you scan certain paper sizes (ie my Verizon bills) it crops the sides (where the dollar amounts are) since the bills are of a size that is one of the pre-determined sizes. Of course, I could measure the size of the bill and imput it manually, but that would be a tremendous hassle if I have to measure every paper and imput its size (why not just make the scan area a little bigger (ie letter size). It is not that user friedly and you really lack flexibility by not having a twain driver. The speed is good and the two sided scanning a plus. Resolution is poor and the machine overall seems to be overpriced for its cheap construction.
Rating: 
Summary: Double-feed a big problem
Review: This machine has tremendous trouble with feeding. One third of the time I get a double feed which means that I have to rescan the whole stack. Also, when you scan certain paper sizes (ie my Verizon bills) it crops the sides (where the dollar amounts are) since the bills are of a size that is one of the pre-determined sizes. Of course, I could measure the size of the bill and imput it manually, but that would be a tremendous hassle if I have to measure every paper and imput its size (why not just make the scan area a little bigger (ie letter size). It is not that user friedly and you really lack flexibility by not having a twain driver. The speed is good and the two sided scanning a plus. Resolution is poor and the machine overall seems to be overpriced for its cheap construction.
Rating:
Summary: ScanSnap easy to use!
Review: This scanner has become essential tool for helping me get work done around the office! I have lots of documents and marketing materials, and business cards that need to be scanned for filing as well as sending to my clients. I really like the idea of automatically scanning to PDF since it's a standard and my clients prefer that I send information to them in PDF. Before purchasing my ScanSnap I had looked at a flatbed scanner, but I decided that it would be virtually useless since it can only scan one side of one page at a time. With the automatic document feeder, I can scan both sides of the page at the same time. And, the speed of the scanning is very fast. This is important to me because most of the documents I work with have more that one page and are often double-sided. I can scan a stack of pages and not have to worry which one is color and which one is black and white since ScanSnap does it for me! I just put the paper in the scanner and press the button. The business card scanning software that comes with this product lets me update my contacts in Microsoft Outlook very easily. So, the bottom line is that I am able to get more done using ScanSnap. And to a small business person like me that matters! I recommend ScanSnap to anyone who needs a reliable document scanner that's easy to use and takes a lot of the complexity out of scanning documents.
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