Home > Consumer Reviews > Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner

I have used this scanner and its software for the last 7 months. It works extremely well, is very fast, has nearly perfect software, and is well worth the cost. The bundled software alone is worth quite a bit. Use the background OCR for scanned documents along with Google Desktop Search or similar and you will be able to find things in seconds most of the time.

I scan every piece of mail, receipt, or paper that I get. I can now realistically go paperless - this is what I've been waiting for.

It would be nice if it had standard driver interfaces or Linux support, but I'm very happy with it otherwise.

I have horrible problems with technology. I buy stuff, and after 4 hours of trying to get it to do what I thought it should do, it doesn't. HP does this to me all the time.

That is why I was floored when I got the S510 working in under 20 minutes exactly as I wanted it to.

You can take a bunch of pieces of paper, scan in both sides, capture it to PDF, OCR it, make it search-able, save it to disk... all by pressing one button.

I am using the ScanSnap filing system software that comes with it. It is essentially a glorified file explorer, except that it will do text in PDF searches for you based on the directory (Or Cabinet as they call it).

I set mine to extreme compression, and full resolution, and then the auto OCR. The software warns you that it will slow down scanning, and it does. It maxes out my 2-3 year old Dell D600 with .5G of RAM laptop, but it gets the job done. I can still use the computer so it doesn't block like I have read elsewhere (maybe for the S500).

This is an upgrade to the S500. Mine was black, not sure what's up with the white ones (maybe mac?).

It comes with Adobe Acrobat 8. This allows you to delete pages, rotate them, etc.

The OCR is amazing. Out of the box, it gets a little confused with i1IlL but so do I, bump it up to the max resolution, and the OCR is flawless.

I probably won't bother with the try & buy Rack2 Filer. Google Desktop isn't essential for searching.

In the hundreds of papers that I scanned over the weekend, I may have had 3 jams which are REALLY easy to clear, and the software is pretty smart about it.

If I had a newer / heftier computer, things would go A LOT faster (not the fault of the scanner or the software though, I watched my CPU spike and slow during scanning & OCR)

This literally was one of the only pieces of gear I have taken out of the box, and had 100% functional within the hour.

My .005% gripe; Be able to tell the scanner "Yeah, don't scan the backs of these pages" rather than navigate all through the menus. But disk is cheap, and I can always delete it with Acrobat later.

I'll recommend it to my friends & customers.

For the price of the product, and the advertised speeds and functions, you'd think all of your printed material could be fed into this scanner. You'd be wrong. Snapshots will jam in this device. You are locked into Fujitsu's software for scanning. And, you do not get TWAIN drivers for the device, so you cannot acquire images from this scanner when inside a program like Paint Shop Pro. This is a single-purpose scanner: feed it all of your sheets of paper, and it will convert them to PDFs. If you have a lot of paper, then this is your scanner. If you have a lot of mixed media, this is NOT your scanner. Find another automatic document feed (ADF) scanner with TWAIN driver support.

-C

A fast document scanner like this one can be a huge help in organizing your life. Six months ago, the S510 was about the only game in town for a reasonable price. Now, there may be better options, especially for rather heavy-duty users like me. The pluses have been well-written about, so I'll give only the minuses:

1) No Grey Scale! B/W is fine for pure text and some graphics, but is horrible with photos. In a publication with b/w photos, one is stuck with either copying in full color which results in large files, or manually switching between color mode and B/W mode since "Auto-Color Detect" senses color, not the presence of photos.

2) The paper input tray has fences that are too short. Pages tend to torque left as they feed. The paper output tray has no fences at all, which often means that the output pages get shifted around or kicked off onto the floor. The "De-skew" option can get confused if there is graphics on the page or if the printing is stylized.

3) The color scans are too light and there is no way to adjust the setting.

4) Japan has lousy paper. As a result, this scanner has a hard time with good quality paper as it's too thick.

5) Oft-used scan options are buried in strangely organized menus.

6) Inadequate cooling. A few cooling holes in the base along with rubber feet would fix the problem, but as it is, there is no airflow through the unit.

7) Life limit of 150,000 - 200,000 pages, possibly due to the bad cooling. There are now quite a few pixels missing from the scans; it's still okay for text, but irritating for illustrations.

It's doing the job, but I'd shop around were I looking for the same type of scanner today.

Anyone out there who, like me, tends to accumulate a lot of paper needs to beg, borrow, or steal to get their hands on this baby. I've had it exactly a week today, and it's already had a huge impact on my life. I've had one of those "milk crates" sitting in my office, stuffed full of papers I wanted to keep or scan using my flatbed scanner for several months. I would make a dent in it every so often, but certainly never emptied it. With the ScanSnap, I finished it in under one week.

The scanner is a lot smaller than it looks in the pictures - takes up very little room when closed, and not much more when opened fully. It was simple as can be to hook up - install the bundled software, plug in the power and USB cords, and you're in business! It has worked like a dream since scan #1 and I am finding the ScanSnap Organizer software adequate for my needs.

I'm fine 90% of the time with the simple PDF format, but the OCR/searchable PDF settings have worked just fine also with the software I already had installed. the scan quality at Normal/Fastest is still clear enough for most things I want to save, and even when I've changed the setting to Best Quality a few times, the scan was still pretty fast.

As most people have noted, the scanner does not have TWAIN support, which was my only concern pre-ordering this, as I am pretty attached to my Nuance PaperPort software. But I haven't missed it at all. PaperPort can still view, organize annotate, and edit the ScanSnap PDFs just fine. I just allow PaperPort a view into the new folder and voila! The PDF format is just so universal these days, that I just don't think it's an issue. If the ScanSnap's output was a proprietary format, my opinion might be different, but you just cannot argue with 1. place papers to be scanned in tray, 2. Hit big green button to scan. 3. Throw newly scanned papers away. Open PDF in whatever program you want to use to edit, annotate, etc.

I have had minimal trouble with papers jamming and when it did happen, I could easily see why - paper had a tear I didn't see, a stray staple got stuck, etc. The rollers do slip and make a squealing sound on glossy paper sometimes. I have had maybe 2-3 instances of the scanner pulling through more than one page at a time, and again, I could usually see why this happened. More user-error than the fault of this wonderful invention!

Another big-time bonus for me -- when scanning with my flatbed through PaperPort, that software holds the scans in a temp file somewhere until you have scanned your whole batch. You also have to scan a blank page between each set of pages to separate articles. On more than one occasion, I have scanned a pile of magazine articles or something into PaperPort, made sure all my blanks were in place, and hit the "Finished Scanning" button, only to have it freeze up on me and lose EVERY single page. I have yet to find where those temp files might be (if anywhere) to try and salvage them when this happens. I'd resorted to scanning only about 20 pages at a time before letting it do its thing stacking and dividing. Definitely slowed me down even more than scanning one page at a time with a flatbed should take.

But that has all changed. The ScanSnap is the tool I have been waiting for to help me FINALLY finish my office decluttering. It is truly amazing, and if any of what I've said rings true for you, you NEED this scanner. It's not a luxury - it's a necessity!