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One of the slightly annoying things about ScanSnap Manager is that in the UI, it doesn’t tell you what the image quality settings relate to in dots per inch (dpi) terms.

If you for whatever reason need to be scanning at a certain dpi, it’s not immediately obvious which to choose.

The information is a bit buried in the Help, so I thought I’d paste it here as well. Hope this helps.

• Normal (Fastest) (Color: 150dpi, Monochrome: 300dpi)
  Select this setting when you want to scan documents quickly.
• Better (Faster) (Color: 200dpi, Monochrome: 400dpi)
  Select this setting when you want to scan documents at a high quality.
• Best (Slow) (Color: 300dpi, Monochrome: 600dpi)
  Select this setting when you want to scan documents at a higher quality.
• Excellent (Slower) (Color: 600dpi, Monochrome: 1200dpi)
  Select this setting when you want to scan documents at the highest quality.

Photo by Editor B

DocumentSnap reader Stuart wrote in because he was having problems scanning checks (or cheques, if you are in Canada or the UK) using his ScanSnap in to his bank’s interface for electronic deposit.

I don’t know if this is specific to USAA or not, but here are the bank’s requirements for upload:

• JPG image
• 200 dpi
• Greyscale

Stuart was having problems getting the bank to accept the ScanSnap’s scans, so here is what we ended up doing.

• Go to your ScanSnap profile (or create a new one) and set a custom paper size for the checks
• Set the profile to scan to JPG
• Set it to Color and Better quality, which is 200dpi for Color
• Scan away

It turns out that USAA would accept the color image and convert it to greyscale. If your bank doesn’t, you may need to do an intermediate step and use an image program like Preview on the Mac or the Windows equivalent to convert it to b&w first.

Once this workflow was done, Stuart was able to scan in the checks and the bank took them no problem.

Does anyone else use the ScanSnap for importing checks or documents to your bank? Do you have a better workflow than this one? Let us know in the comments.

I personally don’t know a lot about the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management system, but I came across this video.

If you are familiar with Alfresco, this is a quick video that shows how they use the ScanSnap S300 to scan documents such as invoices and medical recoreds right into Alfresco.

Even if you don’t use Alfresco, it’s still a pretty cool demo of using the scanner to integrate with an existing business systems.

Do you use your scanner to automatically send documents into a system in your business?

Here’s another helpful video from Fujitsu.

If you want to keep your scanner running well for the long haul, or if you are running into problems, before you replace your ScanSnap consumables it may be worth giving it a good clean.

Here’s a video that Fujitsu has posted on the subject.

According to the comments on this post, you can use isopropyl alcohol instead of the official F1 cleaner.

Are you a keener and clean your ScanSnap preventatively?

Recently, Neatco was awesome enough to send me a review copy of the NeatDesk scanner with the bundled NeatWorks software. I liked both products (here’s the NeatDesk review and NeatWorks review), but since I already have a ScanSnap S300M here, and really liked Neatco’s software, I wanted to try using my ScanSnap as a scanner with NeatWorks as the software.

This is possible because Neatco will sell NeatWorks for Mac separately. Unfortunately, I don’t believe they currently sell the Windows version standalone.

The guys at Neatco are smart. Instead of being all Apple-ish and saying “our software will only work with our product!”, they recognize that people who already own ScanSnaps, and there are a lot of us, could benefit from NeatWorks as well so why not make some cash from us too. Brilliant.

Integrating NeatWorks with the ScanSnap is incredibly easy. In fact, they’ve added a menu item right into the program to set it up for you!

I made this video that goes through the steps:

In a nutshell:

• Start ScanSnap Manager running
• In NeatWorks, go to Scan | Fujitsu ScanSnap Settings

• A screen will come up telling you that ScanSnap Manager is running, and there is a button saying “Configure and restart ScanSnap Manager”. Click it.

• Once ScanSnap Manager restarts, you’ll have a new Profile called Scan to NeatWorks and when you check the settings, it’s configured to scan to NeatWorks.app

• Scan a document in your ScanSnap, and it should kick it to NeatWorks for you to process. Done!

That’s it! Like I said, incredibly easy.

Is anyone out there already using your ScanSnap with NeatWorks? How’s the integration going?

UPDATE: I have tested NeatWorks using the ScanSnap S1300 and S1100. You can read about the NeatWorks ScanSnap test here.