|
HERE WE ARE, five years into the 21st century, and the likelihood of finding a truly paperless office seems as far-fetched a notion as strapping a rocket-pack to your back to get to it. In fact, a decade has passed since the expression came into (and later out of) vogue, and research indicates that if anything, offices actually use more paper now than ever before.
Yet who are we to point fingers at anyone? After all, we devote entire pages to scanners and their wondrous digital applications, geeking out on resolution, automatic photo restoration technologies and color accuracy, while repeatedly skirting the issue of digitizing documents to curb wasteful paper use.
We try our best to conserve. We recycle what we can and try to print as much as we can on both sides of sheets of paper. So when Fujitsu introduced its new ScanSnap, its first Mac-compatible scanner, we felt some moral obligation to check it out. The compact device, slightly smaller than your run-of-the-mill, cheapo home office fax machine, stands as one of the few devices we've seen in recent years that brings us a step closer to this mythical notion of a paperless office.
While most consumer scanners on the market lean more toward photo hobbyists and professionals than the occupants of a cubicle colony, the ScanSnap is equipped with the wherewithal to capture decent looking copies of a paper-based document. Its resolution taps out at a mere 600 dpi. This means it won't give you high-resolution, photo-quality scans of a printed images, but it will most certainly give you all you need to copy invoices, work orders, contracts and any other important paperwork you can come up with. Its scanning mechanism—a dual CCD image sensor that automatically executes duplex, or double-sided, scanning—has just what it takes to adequately reproduce crisp, legible text, as well as simple graphics, like charts and graphs. By design, the ScanSnap driver recognizes and removes blank pages. It also detects color, even where it's mingled with monochrome text and images, and scans the two separately to help keep files sizes manageable and under control. After all is said and done, the ScanSnap automatically saves your paper-based documents as PDFs on your Mac's hard drive or a specified location on your network.
Armed with a recycling bin brimming with old pay stubs, tax forms, assorted memos and even a small collection of business cards, we took the ScanSnap to task. What we found was that this handy little device works like a charm. To scan a document, you simply place your papers into the documents feeder, as if you were trying to send a fax. Then press the Scan button. Your documents pass through the ScanSnap and within a matter of seconds, are transformed into a PDF on your Mac. We also found that the ScanSnap was capable of processing upwards of ten color, double-sided pages per minute, and nearly twice as number when scanning single-sided pages with black and white text.
At first we were put off by the lack of an Optical Character Recognition application (that converts scanned text into an editable text document) in the ScanSnap's software bundle. But, upon closer examination we found that the scanner is packaged with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard, which allows you to create, edit, share and if needed, lock up PDFs. There's really no need for an OCR application. For shear simplicity and speed, the ScanSnap won us over. However, at $500, this one-trick pony seems a little lean on features. For a fraction of its price, you can easily find an entry level flatbed scanner that will perform many of the same tasks, and much more.
–COLLIN KEEFE
ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM: 
Fujitsu | http://scansnap.fujitsu.com | 800-340-4425 | $500
Pros:Compact document scanner that scans directly to PDF, easy to use, automatic doublesided scanning, comes bundled with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard.
Cons: Expensive, limited applications.
Requires: OS 10.2 or higher, at least 256MB RAM, 700MB of hard disk space
macHOME recommends: USB 2.0
|
