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Fast, Excellent Document Scanner: Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M - Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/04/fast-excellent-docum.html

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30 Comments • Add a comment

Anon • #1 • 16:55 on Thu, Mar. 4 • Reply

I just bought one of these for work. The linux support is fantastic, it never jams

even duplex scanning 50 page stacks of crumpled old records. I second your review

emphatically!

Steven Wyatt • #2 • 17:02 on Thu, Mar. 4 • Reply

I would love to hear a recommendation for a scanner that can also be used to scan

books (as opposed to loose paper). I am starting work on my dissertation, and it

would be an absolute dream if I were able to scan my sources into PDF, searchable,

highlightable... ::sigh:: Ive seen a couple good ones, but they are either far too

expensive, or not in the least bit mac compatible.


snapscan FTW!

I had an all-in-one HP (C6100 i think) and it was soooooooooooooooooooooooo

sloooooooooooooooooooooooow. And super buggy. Got a snapscan on the

recommendation of a peer and am impressed. A great product.

On a related note, I have had many HP products over the years (mom was an

employee and got a discount) and I can vouch that their products are invariably

disappointing. Okay, not invariably, there is an old centronix laser writer that is still

plugging away at mom's house but that hardly makes up for the dozens (literally) of

printers that needed replacement and the laptops and desktops filled with cheap

proprietary components and bloatware. It is sad to see one of the former industry

pillars reduced to pushing products of dollar store quality.


I second the opinion on the fujitsu scan snap 1500. I have both the windows version

Fast, Excellent Document Scanner: FujitsuScanSnap 1500MMark Frauenfelder at 4:22 PM March 4, 2010

I reviewed the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M scanner overt at Credit.com. I absolutely love it.

I set a stack of 17 two-sided

documents into the sheet feeder,

pressed the blue illuminated "Scan"

button and the ScanSnap 1500M

whipped through them in 50 seconds.

I was honestly surprised that my

computer (a MacBook Pro with a 2.2

Ghz processor) was capable of

accepting data at such a fast pace. I

was used to scanning documents on

my HP C4280 scanner-printer-copier,

which is mind-numbingly slow and

has a buggy driver that crashes my

computer, forcing a reboot about

25% of the time I use it.

A few seconds after all the pages were scanned, the Evernote application made a

pinging tone, indicating that the document had been scanned and saved. I

checked to make sure that both sides of each page had been scanned correctly --

yes they had, and the software discarded the sides that were blank). Later, I

tested Evernote's character recognition and found it to be flawless. That means

my documents can be found by entering keywords into Evernote's search field.

Since I got it, I've been processing about 100 pages of documents per day.

Read review on CreditBloggers | Buy ScanSnap 1500M on Amazon

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and the mac version (home and work) and they both rock. character recognition is

basically the best I have ever used. It is fast, reliable, and basically does the job

well. There is also a larger, corporate version of this with a touchscreen, and

supports LDAP so you can centralize scanning in the office. I think the model

number is the fi-6010n. Scans directly to your email inbox from a central location or

you can scan it directly to a target users mailbox (scan to email). Works great!

haineux • #5 • 17:09 on Thu, Mar. 4 • Reply

Scanning a black-and-white, high contrast page at 300dpi is about ONE MEGABYTE

of data.

I worked on a scanner back at DEC in 1982 that could scan one page PER SECOND

-- even a cheap netbook can keep up with 1 MB/s over USB.

The OCR is MUCH MUCH HARDER. That multi-million-dollar DEC computer would

have taken many MINUTES to do the OCR.

So why are scanners so slow?

1) Most people scan at 1200 or 9600 dpi, because "it's better." (Um, I'm sure

there's some fine detail in that magazine picture that NEEDS all those megapixels,

but OCR actually works better at a moderate dpi.)

2) Because (most) scanner's motors and logic are dirt cheap, each "line" of the

scan involves bumping the motor, waiting for the motor to stop (90% of the time),

grabbing the pixels, compressing them, and communicating over the bus.

Those old scanners (and probably some of the better new ones) ran the paper

through at a constant speed, and slurped the data into memory "on the fly," then

sent it out the bus in one big spurt.

jdollak • #6 • 17:12 on Thu, Mar. 4 • Reply

I actually use this model at work, and have scanned in roughly a year's worth of

reports and assorted documentation.

I have a few problems that have cropped up in using it heavily for a half year.

1 - The feeding area needs a better guide. If the paper has a curvature because it

was in storage for awhile, it tends to gravitate in one direction. I usually have to

hold a finger in place to ensure that it keeps scanning straight.

2 - It can't handle shifts in paper thickness too well. If you switch up between a thin

piece and a thick piece, it will usually scan them through together, and you have to

redo the scan. Altering the sequence allows you to fix this.

But it is a very good scanner, and I plan on getting one for home eventually. I'd

also like to point out that the software is VERY smart. It usually orients the paper

correctly regardless of how it is scanned.

haineux replied to comment from Steven Wyatt • #7 • 17:17 on Thu, Mar. 4 •Reply

Google is using digital cameras to scan books, two cameras per double-page

spread. Interleaving the resulting digital images is some work, but the real hard

part is turning the pages.

You can do the same: Get any digital camera that can focus at a reasonably close

distance, and then set it to generate 2 megapixel images. (Too many bits makes

OCR less reliable.)

Then you have to find OCR that can be controlled by software, so that it can

automatically combine the various pages into one output file. (The other hard part

is finding OCR software that understands whatever technical jargon is in your

texts.)

Even then, the results will only be 99% or so, so plan on spending a few minutes

per page fixing -- unless, of course, you have reCAPTCHA to help out, as Google

does.

Also, whenever possible, get a cheap paperback copy of the book, and take it down

to a print shop and get them to cut the binding off. Then use a scanner like the one

above. It will almost certainly do a better job.

misterdna • #8 • 18:43 on Thu, Mar. 4 • Reply

I gotta admit, scanners like this appealed to me, but not the price of $42o. Then I

bought a HP Scanjet 8250 scanner for only $65 at geeks.com! It was reconditioned,

though geeks.com didn't mention that fact anywhere on their website. Regardless,

for roughly 15% the price of the scanner you are recommending, I've been pretty

damn happy with the HP's one and two-sided document scanning abilities. The HP

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