I’ve been using ScanSnaps since they first appeared on the horizon. Prior to that, I’d been on a serious quest to become totally paperless. I worked in a law firm and convinced them to get a scanner and I learned how to use it. The machine was large, complicated and expensive. If it hadn’t been so expensive I would have bought one for myself to use at home, but I just couldn’t justify it. When the ScanSnap was announced I realized that finally there was a scanner that could scan batches of documents at an affordable price. I assumed that there had to be a catch, and that would mean the scanner wasn’t quite top-notch.
I bought one anyway. I realized instantly that this was the holy grail of scanners. And, as I said, I’ve been using them ever since. Every one of these scanners has been a model of reliability. I’ve recommended these scanners to hundreds of people and every single person I’ve recommended it to has wound up falling in love with it. Like anything in the world of technology, it is best if you take the time to explore the settings and figure out how to make it work best for you. As a home scanner there is simply no other option, not in my view. The all-in-one machines are fine if you only want to scan a few things here and there. If you are going to scan stacks of documents then you need a real scanner.
How good is this scanner?
Well, like I said, I’m a lawyer and I’ve recommended this scanner to other lawyers and helped them set it up. Many other tech-savvy lawyers I know have discovered this scanner on their own. Lawyers as you may know, are huge devourers of paper. A couple of lawyers I know work in small firms where this is the only scanner. It can totally handle the workflow of paper that a small firm of lawyers receives. But, most of these firms quickly decide to get a scanner for each lawyer. And why not? It’s not that expensive, especially when you consider that it comes pre-loaded with Adobe Acrobat (which is normally a $200+ value). If you want to be paperless then you want to scan to PDF, and having Acrobat allows you to manipulate your PDFs (e.g. add signatures, insert pages, rotate pages, make sticky notes etc.).
I’ve used both the Mac version of this scanner and the Windows version and they are completely equivalent. They both work wonderfully. The Windows version of this scanner comes with wonderful software called ScanSnap Organizer, which makes it really easy to batch scan a bunch of different papers (e.g. bank statements, utility bills, receipts etc) and then later on put them into folders or whatever you want to do to organize things. The Mac version doesn’t come with this software, but there is a great program called ‘Yep’ (just google ‘yep mac software’ and you’ll find it) that costs about $34 and is even better (in my opinion) than the Organizer software that comes with the Windows version of the ScanSnap.
It’s rare in the world of technology that one product winds up dominating because it simply stands heads-and-shoulders above everything else that purports to compete with it. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is one such product. I advise a lot of lawyers about becoming paperless, and whenever I hear that someone has tried and failed to make the switch away from paper, I often find that the root problem is with their scanner. It’s either too powerful (and therefore too complicated), or it’s not powerful enough (e.g. the all-in-one device, and this is even true of the $10,000 high end multi-function devices). The ScanSnap is like the porridge in the Goldilocks fable: it’s just right.
Install the software, then plug it in and hook it to the computer. Configure it and then load a stack of paper. Try putting a letter in upside down and see what happens (it will auto rotate it to the proper orientation). It will straighten pages that you load crooked, and it will scan the front and back of pages at the same time. But it will toss out the back pages if they’re blank. It can scan in color or black & white. You can run OCR (optical character recognition) so that the document will be text-searchable (I don’t do this because it takes a little extra time and generally isn’t worth it, but you can do it easily if you want). If you get this and want more room on your desk then get rid of your fax machine and get a low-cost web based fax service like [...] which lets you send and receive faxes by email. You’ve got the Scanner and I presume you have an email account.
What are you waiting for? The paperless revolution awaits you, and all you need to make the first step is this Scanner.