We’ve run Fujitsu scanners at work (the 1500 series) for some time, so when I decided to pick one up for home, Fujitsu seemed the natural choice. I ordered the ScanSnap S1300 from Amazon for around $250, which was a good deal compared to other places online. Overall, I’m very impressed by the quality of the hardware, and the software was a bit surprising, in that it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.

Some of you are probably wondering why I feel the need for a sheet-fed scanner at home, and the simple answer is that it was either this or another filing cabinet (which we don’t really have room for).  As an added bonus, finding things is a whole lot easier, as is emailing copies of paperwork.  Moreover, scanned images of thermal-printed receipts will never fade.

This scanner has no TWAIN support in its driver, so you have to use only their “Scan Manager” (which saves as PDF and JPG, so it’s fine, really). The included filing software is quite slick. It doesn’t have tons of features, but supports external file associations (so you can use your own copy of Acrobat for anything it can’t do).

Contrary to what the “purchased with this item” might suggest, this scanner has a MINI-USB plug, which makes it nice for portable use, as many of my other portable devices use the same plug. Lastly, regarding the autofeeder, the documentation is conservative when listing it at 10-page capacity. With thinner than average paper, I was able to run 15-16 sheets before it started double feeding. 10 pages seems about right for ordinary copy paper. The scanner does occasionally have problems feeding card stock (think like oak-tag), or paper that is torn or irregularly shaped (like a packing slip with a quarter of the 8.5×11 removed)

Software Notes

The basic scanning software can do a variety of things with the scanned document. Most basically, it can either make a PDF of the pages, or a JPEG (photograph), and store either in the included organization software. If you choose the PDF option, it can recognize the text within each document and make them searchable.

That said, the included software is “content agnostic” in that it doesn’t know and doesn’t care what’s in each file; It has no way of recognizing vendor names or anything else off of each document. If you plan on scanning mostly receipts, you might be better off with a device designed for that purpose (Like NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System)… I don’t have any direct experience with that device, though I have seen them in the store. They don’t seem as well built as the Fujitsu, but might better fit certain needs.

Most of this post is a rip of the review I wrote of this scanner for Amazon.  It’s not plagiarism if I’m copying myself.

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Products, Technology by Kevin