Customer Reviews

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for the Macintosh

5 star:		(348)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Great tool. What a scanner should be. This is another world from the speed and software efficiency you have in the average scanner and All In One Printers. So I am happy to have both a AIO device and this great tool for document management.

My use:
Now all the invoices and in general, all my printed documents are converted into searchable pdf into an easy to access archive.

I can recover from a fax or a printed document and edit it in word or excel tables or iWork and save a lot of time retyping

Business cards are archived in a short time and included in my address book and so also on my iPhone.

PLUS
A single, easy to use, application manages the very fast scanning and efficient OCR conversion of printed documents outputting directly in searchable PDF, Word, Excel, email attachment, address book and VCF contacts. Also business card OCR is quiet effective and the limit is due to strange character and graphics and you can find on some more creative cards.

Compared to what you find in the AIO devices and average scanners, paper handling is superior and errors are avoided. In the case of skipped pages (Happens rarely) a sensor warns you and show you which page is missing.

CONS
Only shortcoming is that Acrobat Pro is included in version 8.0 and not the last 9.0 but I suppose that this will change soon.

But I mean this in a good way. The ScanSnap S1500M gobbles up piles of paper at an amazing rate. One-side or two-side scanning takes the same time. I have put just about every type of paper through it, often of mixed sizes and types (e.g., legal and letter size, 3x5 cards, newspaper and magazine clippings, unfolded brochures). A carrier sheet is available for crumpled, folded, or extremely thin paper. I've only had one paper jam (an odd-shaped, somewhat crumpled page that I ran without using the carrier sheet). Clearing jams is trivially easy because of the almost straight-through paper path. I am amazed by the quality of the scans. Photos sometimes look better than the originals. It small and almost silent. The software is easy to use. I have seldom, if ever, had a computer peripheral that I was as happy with.

I've scanned approximately 15,000 pages with this scanner and it couldn't have been easier. I did get the occasional "paper jam" when the sheet feeder picked up the next page as it was feeding the current page. Clearing a jam is trivial: pop the cover open, remove the pages, snap the cover back, continue scanning. Considering I was feeding in papers from 15 - 20 years ago, I expected the pages to occasionally stick together. This scanner is worth every penny.

I got my ScanSnap 2 weeks ago and have now scanned about 7,000 pages of docs. Although I feel it's a flawed product, I think it's still the best available that I've found.

GOOD:
* The hardware is really good at what it does: wicked fast, solid quality scanning. I can easily tear through 300-500 pages an evening.

* The hardware workflow deals efficiently with common problems, most notably, reliably detecting & helping you correct when a page misfeeds.

* It folds up into a small footprint on your desk.

NOT GOOD:
* Hardware build quality feels really cheap for a $450 device. Most notably, the paper feed gears are all plastic. Mine already broke in just the first 10 days requiring complete replacement of the scanner.

* It's marketed as allowing up to 50 pages in the sheet feeder, my experience is that it typically can't feed paper unless you go down to 15-20. When I try with more, it makes a horrible noise and jams up. (I'm pretty sure this is what broke the plastic gear.)

Finally, the mediocre software. Speaking as a usability engineer who has also worked in the Mac OS team at Apple, the software interface is remarkably disappointing, especially for a Mac OS app. Saddeningly, most of the kinds of problems I see are ones that could have been cumulatively fixed in just a few man-weeks of a good designer & engineer's time. Here's just a smattering:

* After the first two pages that you scan, the window focus returns to the scan progress dialog. In other words, if you start a scan and go do something else (like surfing the web), the first time you press the space bar or return key, your scan job is aborted without undo, since you've pushed the "Stop" button unwittingly.

* File names can't be saved if you use characters prohibited on Windows (but not Mac). Worse, when you enter the name and it gives you an error (which gives factually incorrect criteria for what characters you can and can't type -- it keeps telling me I can't enter characters that I know I didn't), you lose the entire file name you chose and have to re-create it from scratch.

* The user interface text was clearly written by a non-native English speaker lacking usability or user assistance experience. Buttons and labels frequently even fail to conform to Apple's own naming guidelines. Even though the concepts behind the software are simple, it's often necessary to read the user manual to understand what different functions actually do, because the text labels are so poorly crafted, and rarely relate to the user task at hand. The error messages sometimes are just unbelievable -- I've worked on the design and creation of consumer software for 16 years and I've *never* seen anything this sloppy.

* There's so much low-hanging fruit that could make the software great: why can't it automatically propose a file name based on the first few words of a scan? Why can't the OCR take place in the background, so that you can get your scanning done and do the conversion overnight? (etc)

The documentation is also unbelievably bad: it's not task-oriented, there's factual mistakes where they copied and pasted out-of-date content from the prior model that doesn't apply to the S1500M, it buries the most critical things you need to know in tangents, and is written for an era in which users read a multi-hundred page document from back to back. If I were still teaching undergraduate technical communication, I would use it with my students for comic relief.

All that said, this scanner has enabled me to reclaim my closet and I'm very grateful for it. But it's far from a perfect product, and the flaws are ones that companies have no excuse for perpetuating at this price point, or in this era. Hopefully in 5 years there will be competitors that build fast scanners with reliable quality and well-crafted software -- but this ain't it.

I'm a proud new owner of a ScanSnap S1500M. I've owned many flatbed scanners and a multifunction device with a scanner, and I have to say the ScanSnap is among the best. Like most people, I've been digitizing my documents to reduce clutter. However, with my flatbed scanner, it gets very tedious to open the lid, flip the page, then click on the scanning software to continue scanning. A few pages takes a lot of time to digitize. With my ADF-equipped scanners, it was more hands-free, but the scans tended to be skewed. In all my past scanners, I could not search my PDFs.

My ScanSnap arrived a few days ago, and I've scanned several hundred pages. It is absolutely fast, no joke. Another reviewer said it's a paper eater (to denote scanning speed). It really munches on paper quickly. Actually, it is so quick, I spend more time preparing the documents (unstaple, arrange, etc.) than running it through the scanner. Plus, Fujitsu did a great job with the footprint. It is a very small scanner. Just a little bit wider than a sheet of paper, and maybe half as tall as the long side of a sheet of paper. The trays also fold in, so it looks like a small rectangular block when it's all folded in. The sheet feeding tends to be pretty straight. It did jam a few times, but they tend to be on thin sheets of paper. In case of a jam, there is a compartment you open up, just like un-jamming an office photocopier. Overall, I am very pleased with the scanner device.

The reason I gave it an overall 4 Stars is because their software needs some improvements. First of all, there's no Organizer software that provides the added usability of the PC version. If you go on YouTube, and search for S1500M, you will notice they are pitching the S1500 (PC version). In comparing the software capabilities from the video to what I actually got, I really would like the Organizer. As it is, when you press the Scan button on your scanner, it will invoke ScanSnap Manager on your Mac. That piece of software only lets you control what will happen when the Scan button is pressed (Save to a Folder, Send to Word, Quality settings, ...). But, what happens after the scan is not organized for you.

Open the YouTube video address below, then skip to the time 2:10. It talks about Send to ScanSnap Organizer folder. That's not in the Mac version, consequently, the Mac version doesn't get the View, Crop, and Highlight features in ScanSnap Organizer. Why?

[...]

Another complaint is that unlike the PC version, the Mac version only comes with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Pro (PC comes with 9.0), although I think 8.0 is pretty good already.

The Searchable PDF feature is great. The OCR is pretty good. Here's the bad part though, and I think it's related to not having Organizer. To make the scans searchable, you have to turn on the "Convert to Searchable PDF" checkbox in the ScanSnap Manager's "File option" tab. When you load your documents and press Scan, the software will create the PDF, then there's another step to run it through OCR. If you scan in low volume, just a few sheets at a time, you'll be okay. But I scan 50-150 pages at a time. The ten or so seconds to OCR a page adds up to tens of minutes per batch. During the time it does OCR, you cannot continue scanning!!! Believe me, I tried but the Scan button does nothing while OCR is working. That's not good at all. I would rather scan my next batch, then queue up the OCR jobs. That way, I can scan everything now, then go to lunch or leave it running overnight, then it's done when I get back. But with their current setup, you will have to sit by your desk to wait until you can do your next batch. It's kind of like the old days of printing. Can you imagine yourself printing a big document, then being unable to tell MS Word to print the next document until the first one finished? It's kind of like that. Think about it.

Overall, I absolutely love the scanner device. I think it's great. Good job for putting two scanning units to make double-sided scans in one pass. The software is okay. It is missing an Organizer found in the PC version. The OCR is pretty accurate, but when scanning big batches, the OCR process will bottleneck your next batch to scan. If you're like many who are buying a fast scanner because you have many file cabinets of paper to scan, you will find that bottleneck very annoying.

Now, if Fujitsu could fix those limitations for S1500M users, then my complaints disappear and they would deserve a 5 Star rating. If anyone else has similar experience, please add a Note to Fujitsu section in your review. Hopefully Fujitsu will get the idea and work on it.

NOTE TO FUJITSU: Please have a Mac version of ScanSnap Organizer available for S1500M owners. Also, please enhance your software to include a Scan Job Queueing capability, so that people can scan their next job while the software is crunching another job. Kind of like how printing used to be one at a time, but later it could be Queued into a spooler so that users can get on with their job right away. Those would make your scanners unbeatable. Please strongly consider.

This is probably the most valuable hardware I have ever purchased for my Mac and for my office. I am considering purchasing a second one for my home as well. Now the machine looks clunky and large in the picture shown here, but the scanner can be folded down if you are not using it. Look for pictures of folded down machine. It is much more compact and nicer looking then it does on the above picture. That's important too; after all, you want your desk to look neater and less cluttered after getting this machine.

I owned a Neat Receipts Mac scanner previously. S1500M is superior in every way; the difference is so great, I probably should not even compare them. Neat Receipts was agonizing slow and the OCR software was also slow and unreliable (often crashed). I was sorely disappointed. Good thing I tried the S1500M. I've owned this machine for a few months now and have scanned all kinds of documents. Fast and reliable scanning every time. ADF works flawless; never skips a page. Scans both sides of a page automatically when needed; I wasn't even thinking about this feature when I purchased it, but boy that sure is a convenient feature to have.

Adobe Acrobat which came with the scanner is nice; but I recommend also getting Yep! (shareware which utilizes Spotlight -- remember to enable Spotlight or it won't work!) for previewing and organizing all the PDF files you will be creating. You can't work efficiently without a great document scanner and organizer in the 21st century. Invaluable. Invaluable. Get it. Just do it.

UPDATE: Recently some ignorant clerk at the IRS sent me a document of about 20 pages stapled a bunch of times using a broken stapler (the staples were bent irregularly in multiple places). I took off 4 broken staples and ran the document through and realized that there were actually more broken staples in between the documents where it was not visible to me until it jammed my ScanSnap S1500M. It made a grinding noise and I was horrified to discover about 5 more broken stapes between the documents. I thought the S1500M was a sure gonner. After clearing all the jammed papers and staples, it went right back in to smooth action!!! The quality on this scanner is absolutely beautiful. Nevertheless, make sure you thoroughly check your documents before inserting them to your scanner ADF, especially the ones from IRS.

I've been using ScanSnaps since they first appeared on the horizon. Prior to that, I'd been on a serious quest to become totally paperless. I worked in a law firm and convinced them to get a scanner and I learned how to use it. The machine was large, complicated and expensive. If it hadn't been so expensive I would have bought one for myself to use at home, but I just couldn't justify it. When the ScanSnap was announced I realized that finally there was a scanner that could scan batches of documents at an affordable price. I assumed that there had to be a catch, and that would mean the scanner wasn't quite top-notch.

I bought one anyway. I realized instantly that this was the holy grail of scanners. And, as I said, I've been using them ever since. 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. Like anything in the world of technology, it is best if you take the time to explore the settings and figure out how to make it work best for you. As a home scanner there is simply no other option, not in my view. 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.

How good is this scanner?

Well, like I said, I'm a lawyer and I've recommended this scanner to other lawyers and helped them set it up. Many other tech-savvy lawyers I know have discovered this scanner on their own. Lawyers as you may know, are huge devourers of paper. 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 receives. But, most of these firms quickly decide to get a scanner for each lawyer. And why not? It's not that expensive, especially when you consider that it comes pre-loaded with Adobe Acrobat (which is normally a $200+ value). If you want to be paperless then you want to scan to PDF, and having Acrobat allows you to manipulate your PDFs (e.g. add signatures, insert pages, rotate pages, make sticky notes etc.).

I've used both the Mac version of this scanner and the Windows version and they are completely equivalent. They both work wonderfully. The Windows version of this scanner comes with wonderful software called ScanSnap Organizer, which makes it really easy to batch scan a bunch of different papers (e.g. bank statements, utility bills, receipts etc) and then later on put them into folders or whatever you want to do to organize things. The Mac version doesn't come with this software, but there is a great program called 'Yep' (just google 'yep mac software' and you'll find it) that costs about $34 and is even better (in my opinion) than the Organizer software that comes with the Windows version of the ScanSnap.

It's rare in the world of technology that one product winds up dominating because it simply stands heads-and-shoulders above everything else that purports to compete with it. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is one such product. I advise a lot of lawyers about becoming paperless, and whenever I hear that someone has tried and failed to make the switch away from paper, I often find that the root problem is with their scanner. It's either too powerful (and therefore too complicated), or it's not powerful enough (e.g. the all-in-one device, and this is even true of the $10,000 high end multi-function devices). The ScanSnap is like the porridge in the Goldilocks fable: it's just right.

Install the software, then plug it in and hook it to the computer. Configure it and then load a stack of paper. Try putting a letter in upside down and see what happens (it will auto rotate it to the proper orientation). It will straighten pages that you load crooked, and it will scan the front and back of pages at the same time. But it will toss out the back pages if they're blank. It can scan in color or black & white. You can run OCR (optical character recognition) so that the document will be text-searchable (I don't do this because it takes a little extra time and generally isn't worth it, but you can do it easily if you want). If you get this and want more room on your desk then get rid of your fax machine and get a low-cost web based fax service like [...] which lets you send and receive faxes by email. You've got the Scanner and I presume you have an email account.

What are you waiting for? The paperless revolution awaits you, and all you need to make the first step is this Scanner.

I am one of those people who keeps every scrap of paper for fear that I will need something later. That receipt for the shirt I bought 5 years ago? Yep, got it. All my notebooks from college? Yep, got those too. Every bank statement, 401(k) form, and electric bill I've ever received? Well, at least the last 3 years' worth. As one might imagine, organizing and storing all of this has gotten out of control. So I figured digitizing would be the perfect solution. I could still "keep" everything, but on disks (with backups) instead of filing cabinets.

I got this scanner on Friday afternoon; it's now Monday morning. Over the weekend, this thing blew through about 4 1/2 filing cabinet drawers FULL of documents, several thousand pages of bound materials (I unbound and tossed the pages in), three 4-inch binders, and a bankers box full of notebooks. The speed on this thing is amazing, and the quality of the scan images far exceeded my expectations. At 20 ppm, I was hoping for legible. This gives me clear and detailed.

My only complaint with the scanner, and the reason I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, is that it jammed a LOT. Many of those jams I could chalk up to the quality of the paper, like thin pages or materials that were previously stapled and just kinda stuck in the feed. And sometimes it was a matter of trying to feed too much paper at once. However, a lot of it seemed to jam for no apparent reason. It seemed to have more trouble than necessary grabbing one sheet at a time, especially at the very beginning or end of a batch.

This scanner is definitely meant for documents. I did try scanning a couple of photos, tweaking the scanner settings to highest resolution with jpg file output. The images were pretty good, but not really high-res quality.

Even after reading all the reviews, I was really unsure as to how organization of all the scanned images would work. I was hoping that you could take a scan batch and then drag and drop pages or groups of pages into different folders, thereby creating different files. Not so. A batch will create one .pdf file. If you want to combine or split files, you have to do that in Adobe, which is a little bit cumbersome (still easy, but more steps than drag-and-drop). It's faster just to do a separate scan for each document or set of documents that you want to have as a single file.

A couple of things I LOVE about the scanner:
- Size: It looks big and cumbersome in the photo, like it would take up a bunch of room on your desk. But it's really not. Folded up, the footprint is probably half the size of my MacBook Pro. And you don't have to unfold the bottom catch tray in order to scan, just flip the top feed tray up and let the pages spit out onto your desk.
- Durability: I actually sort of dropped the scanner as I was pulling it out of the box. I'm clumsy. I figured it was toast. Nope, plugged it in and it worked just fine.
- Receipt Scanning: Oddly enough, one of the things this scanner handled exceptionally well was small receipts. Just to test the its 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.

When all is said and done, I expect to reduce my paper load from two 4-drawer filing cabinets, four bankers boxes, and about 10,000 pages of bound materials down to a single 2-drawer filing cabinet and a FreeAgent external hard drive. This is one of the best home-office machines I have ever used, and would highly recommend it for anyone who, like me, just can't let go of all those documents!

Simply the best scanner I've ever used (and I've used a lot of 'em). Works better than advertised. You can jam it if you try to (i.e., force a bunch of miss-match wrinkled old papers and sizes) but it is remarkably easy to clear and the software is smart enough to help you restart your scan where you left off so if you're at the end of a 50 page run you don't have to start over from scratch.

You will not believe the speed and quality of this tiny package. It's so good it scans the the backside, mirror image of very thin gas pump receipts, go figure. The Adobe Pro version is a bundle but for the life of me I can't see what options they have disabled. I'm relatively new to the Mac side of things but have been in IT and the PC world for 20 years. Anyway, it does everything I've every needed and it does it better than the PC ever could. If you do the math they are either giving the scanner away or giving the software away. Works for me.

Spend the money and don't look back!

I purchased this about a month ago in order to eliminate the clutter caused by 100's of business cards, it is also used to minimize paper files by scanning bills and invoices.

The CardIris and ScanSnap software work very well. My problem is with the included Acrobat 8 Pro software - BEWARE this software does not work with Mac OS X 10.6 or higher. When I called Adobe they were no help telling me I had to purchase another, more up to date version. I was under a time constraint to get this scanning done so I paid up for the new Acrobat rather than jump through the hoops involved with tracking down the vendor. Point is, rather than getting a scanner for about $400, it actually cost closer to $600. There should be a disclaimer stating that not all software will work with newer Mac Operating Systems.

Lastly, I didn't mind this fact but you should know this is not a plug and play scanner. It is necessary to use the software included in the package - you cannot simply download fujitsu drivers from the internet.

If you are relying on being able to use Acrobat 8 Pro do not purchase this scanner. If that software is not important I would highly recommend the scanner and the non-Adobe products mentioned above.