Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice scanner, with some quibbles, December 17, 2003
By A Customer
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.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Document Scanner for the Money!, August 2, 2003
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good hardware, poor software, November 21, 2003
By A Customer
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.
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