Fujitsu Scansnap - Document scanning
Technology is now advanced enough to have shrunk the traditional large-footprint scanner down to something that resembles the dimensions of a family-sized bar of Toblerone.
Fujitsu has come up with something different with the ScanSnap S300, though, which is allegedly the world’s smallest colour duplex ADF sheetfed scanner, and while not nearly as portable as manual feed models we’ve seen, it could be a good compromise of both.
It’s neatly packaged and looks quite snazzy, with black and silver colouring and a contemporary design; we can imagine this being ideal for casual use in a home office. Powered by either AC or USB, with a separate cable provided, it’s capable of optical resolutions up to 600 x 600dpi.
Unfold the main cover, which includes a retractable A4-sized paper tray, and the devices starts up and is available to use within a few seconds. Fujitsu strongly encourages you to use the provided scan management software rather than any other applications you have installed; there’s a good reason for this which we’ll come to later on.
Luckily this software is pretty capable, allowing you to control both the scan process itself and keep resultant files organised for easy access. There’s a decent range of settings here for controlling the scan speed and quality, the handling of colour images, provision for double-sided scanning and a choice of paper size right down to business card, which the adjustable paper feed will accommodate.
After placing a wad of documents into the feed tray we were impressed by the speed at which it ploughed through: at around 4 seconds per A4 page at the default setting, this thing is lightning quick. At optimum quality things do slow down considerably, so you’re looking at a bit under a minute per page. The S300 also scans directly to PDF and can create searchable PDF files on the fly, with only a small time overhead before results appear.
It’s not all good news, though. While we were impressed by the scanner’s capabilities in an office environment for creating digital copies of documents, receipts, business cards, etc., it does fall down in other areas. To begin with the ScanSnap S300 will only save to PDF format, so image scans are out. This brings us to the software issue we hinted at earlier - it’s not TWAIN compatible, so you are tied to Fujitsu’s supplied applications and can’t use it through other imaging software you may have installed.
From a quality point of view, although this won’t really be as much of an issue in a business environment, we did notice significant pixelation around letters at the default setting, and although this did clear up at optimum quality, we still noticed that text and images showed blocky edges and it was often difficult to establish pure colours. If these kinds of details are important to you in a scanner then the ScanSnap S300 won’t be for you, but in terms of establishing a paperless office it’s fast, easy to use and very capable.
Document Scanning
Document Scanning Manchester
Document Scanning Northwest