Fujitsu ScanSnap

We moved recently, and, as with many others in the same situation, made the following observation:

Why do we have all this crap?

In my case the situation was particularly bad in terms of paper; I’m a natural pack rat, and file far too much paper away for my own good — a realization I came to while hauling my files upstairs.

Even after a serious purge, I still had too much paper. This is not stuff I can just throw away, but I don’t want to be tripping over it, either. Furthermore, disaster planning is a huge part of my day job, and it bothered me that in most cases I had no backup for the information in my files; one fire and it would all be ashes. The natural solution would be to scan it in, but my experience with scanners was best summed up as ‘slow, gruesome toil’.

It turns out that many of the fine folks who lurk at 43 Folders were in the same boat, and some of the discussions there turned me on to the Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. Given the praise heaped upon the device there, and desperate for something to remove the piles of paper, I resolved to purchase one.

These are popular devices; I’ve noticed them in use in hospitals for scanning of insurance cards and the like. However, they’re difficult to source, in my experience, Amazon was the best option. As of this writing, the street price of the current S510M model is approximately $450.

The unit is designed to not take up a lot of room. Here’s mine in the closed configuration, using my beloved red stapler for scale:

Quite compact — 6.2″ x 6.2″ x 11.2″. Not difficult at all to find a place on the desk for it, which is a key consideration; if something is difficult to get to, or so large as to require being packed away when not in use, then you’re not going to use it, which would defeat the whole purpose here.

It’s not much larger in the open configuration:

Bundled software includes Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and ABBYY FineReader OCR software. Considering the list price on Acrobat Professional, the price on this unit isn’t a bad deal. Scan rate is 18 PPM, double-sided, automatic deskew, automatic blank page elimination, with a hopper capacity of 50 pages. Rather than attempt to digest those dry numbers, instead consider the following.

Traditional scanning tends to work like this:

• load paper into scanner
• begin scanning
• clear jam
• reload job
• clear jam again
• realize input is double-sided, reload job
• watch software choke on input
• throw pile of paper across room, seek adult beverage

In contrast, scanning with the ScanSnap works like this:

• load paper into scanner
• press large one-touch scan button
• watch job scan and OCR

This thing has to be seen to be believed. It just churns through paper effortlessly, no jams, no errors, no babysitting required. The rate at which one can eliminate a pile of paper is amazing; so far, I’ve put several linear feet through it. This has dramatically reduced my inventory of dead, bleached, pressed trees, converting them to easily-searchable full-text PDFs.

This is in nearly every respect an outstanding solution. If I have one complaint, it’s that the bundled driver software is an application, rather than a driver, and as such sits in the dock. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, but for whatever reason, the developers decided that the dock icon should be overlaid with a gigantic, garish, red cross symbol when the scanner is off. I find this to be annoying in the extreme.

To address this, I’ve found Dock Dodger, donationware from Foggy Noggin Software, to be just the thing. Dock Dodger allows for the icon to be hidden while the application is running, this removing the fugly icon from the dock. The icon can be reinstated at any time by simply running Dock Dodger again.

However, all in all, the dock icon is but a small issue in what is otherwise a fantastic piece of kit. Highly recommended.

Tags: Organization