Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Review
March 9, 2010
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a review copy of a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, so I thought I’d write up my initial impressions and show some of the new stuff that DocumentSnap readers might find interesting.
As of this writing I have only installed it on Mac OSX, but as I wrote in my initial ScanSnap S1300 announcement post, the S1300 is a “hybrid scanner” which just means it comes with everything you need both for Windows and Mac. Maybe later I’ll do a Windows review too.
Mobile Form Factor
I have to be honest, even though I am a longtime user of the ScanSnap S300M, I have never used it in a mobile situation. I like the mobile ScanSnaps because they take up such a small amount of space, and I personally don’t need the higher speed and capacity of the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M.
You can see from this side by side shot that the size and shape of the S1300 is basically the same as the S300 series.
All that being said, the S1300 comes with mobile features such as USB power, so you can use it without having to plug into a wall outlet (though if you use it this way you need two USB ports – one for the data connection and one for power).
Installation
Installation was very easy. Just put in the CD, install the software, and then plug in the scanner. Fujitsu does a good job of making it extremely fast from unboxing to scanning.
One really nice surprise was that when I installed the S1300 software, it automatically upgraded all my profiles I had with the S300M. I was not expecting that at all!
Long Document Scanning
The ScanSnap S1300 lets you scan long receipts and documents (finally!), a subject in which I have complained about before. To do long document scanning, just put the document in and hold down the blue power key for 3 seconds. Once it starts blinking, its in long document mode. See the video below for a demo.
Auto Quality
If you have small documents, you can have it automatically detect them and up the quality. This was a feature introduced with the S1500 series and is now on the mobile scanners.
Searchable PDFs
One limitation that the S300M had is that it did not come with OCR software to make searchable PDFs. The S1300 comes with it built in for both Macs and PCs.
You can choose on a profile basis whether you want the document to be searchable, and (similar to the S1500 series), you can have it detect highlighted text on a document and save the PDF with searchable keywords. Pretty cool.
Speed And Capacity
Obviously, the S1300 is not going to be as fast as its cousins the S1500 and S1500M. If speed and capacity are your main criteria, you will want to go for the higher model. However, if 8 pages per minute (double sided don’t forget!) is OK for you, and you don’t need to hold more than 10 pages at the time, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 is a great scanner in a very small and portable package.
Since I know some people like videos, here is a video where I show the ScanSnap S1300, some of its new features, and some of the software that comes with it.
Have you tried the ScanSnap S1300 yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Using a Windows ScanSnap On the Mac Using VirtualBox
March 24, 2009
In the past I have posted about how to use Japanese ScanSnap drivers, and have posted that the new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M will be cross-platform, but what if you don’t want to mess around with foreign drivers or have an older ScanSnap scanner?
if you have access to a Windows XP CD, there is a free way that you can use your ScanSnap S510 or S300 on your Mac using VirtualBox. (This may even work with Linux too – I’ve never tried).
VirtualBox is a free open source program that will let you run Windows on your Mac. There’s no rebooting required like Boot Camp – you run Windows inside a window in your Mac. This is great not only for the ScanSnap but for any Windows program you may be stuck using.
There are two requirements to do this:
- You need to have an Intel mac. No Powerbooks or Powermacs, sorry.
- You need to have access to a Windows XP installation CD
Ready? Here’s how to do it:
1. Go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download VirtualBox for OSX hosts
2. Double-click on the downloaded VirtualBox .DMG file and open it up. Then double-click on the VirtualBox.mpkg installer
Follow through all the prompts and click Close when done.
3. In the Applications folder, double click on the VirtualBox application
4. Once VirtualBox starts up, click the New icon
5. Go through the steps of the Wizard. At first, give your new virtual machine a name (you can think of a virtual machine as your new Windows-inside-your-Mac). Give it as much memory as you want but don’t go below the recommendation. For this I stuck with the base 192 Megs but you may want to bump it up if you can.
6. If you are doing this for the first time, chose New for Hard Drive and when you go through the wizard you probably want to choose Dynamic Storage
7. You can leave the name of your new virtual disk as-is and give it whatever you think you need for hard drive space.
8. Hit Finish to end the new virtual disk creation wizard, then Next to choose your new disk, then Finish
9. You’ll now see that the Settings and Start menus are activated. Before we start, we want to enable USB. Click the Settings Icon and then the Ports menu. Click Enable USB Controller.
10. Click OK and then the Green Start arrow
11. You’re going to get a message about it auto-capturing your keyboard. All that is saying is that if you are “in Windows” and you do something like Alt-Tab, it will be doing the Alt-Tab in Windows and not in your Mac. If you don’t want that, just hold down the left Command key. Hit OK.
12. Now it’s time for the First Run Wizard. Pop in your Windows XP CD, choose where it is, and hit Next and Finish if it’s right.
13. Now we get the beautiful blue Windows install screens we know and love. Hit Enter to choose your new Unpartitioned Space and choose to format NTFS. Then let it run.
14. Create a Shared Folder so that your Mac can see documents that your Windows VM has scanned. Click the Shared Folders icon and then Add A Shared Folder.
15. Choose or create a folder and then click Make Permanent and hit OK
16. Before your new shared folder will work, in the top VirtualBox VM menu, choose Devices and then Install Guest Additions. Choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe and follow the prompts
17. Map that new folder to a drive letter, say in this example the Z drive. In Windows Explorer. go to My Network Places, Then Entire Network, then VirtualBox Shared Folders and you should see \\VBOXSVR\Scanned (or whatever you called your new folder). Right click on that and choose Map Network Drive and give it a drive letter.
18. Now it’s time to follow Fujitsu’s instructions for installing your Windows ScanSnap. Don’t plug in your ScanSnap yet but install the software on your Setup CD.
19. Plug in your ScanSnap and turn it on. You will likely find.. nothing happens. Your light on your ScanSnap may blink. You need to tell VirtualBox that you want to enable it first. Click on the Ports icon on the bottom of your VM and choose your scanner from the list of devices.
20. Scan away! Either scan to a folder or using ScanSnap Organizer. Either way, if you want your PDFs to be accessible by the Mac you will probably want to scan them to your drive that you created in step 17.
There we go. It’s really not as complex as this 20 step tutorial may make it sound, but if you give it a try let me know how it goes.
ScanSnap + Evernote = Chocolate + Peanut Butter
January 13, 2009
Recently I’ve been asked quite a bit how to use Evernote with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. It’s a great combination and quite easy. Here’s a video that runs you through the processs. The video shows the Mac version, but Windows will be the same concept.
In a nutshell, here is what you do. In this example I’ll be creating a new ScanSnap Manager Profile, but you can modify an existing one if you want.
- Right click on ScanSnap Manager and choose Settings. If the options are grayed out, disable Quick Menu for ScanSnap Manager
- On the Applications tab, hit Add Or Remove
- Hit Add, click Browse, and find your Evernote application. It will likely be in the Applications folder on the Mac, or C:\Program Files\Evernote on Windows
- Hit Close
- In the “Select A Profile” box, choose Add Profile and give it a name like “Scan To Evernote”
- On the Applications tab, choose Evernote for the Application. Hit Apply.
- Click on ScanSnap Manager and make sure that your new Profile is selected
- Scan and enjoy!
Does anyone else use the ScanSnap with Evernote? Do you do it any other way? Let us know in the comments.
Acrobat Applescript For ScanSnap OCR
September 5, 2008
This was referenced in my ScanSnap workflow series, but I thought I would provide it in its own article as well.
I have a ScanSnap S300M and Adobe Acrobat, and was getting pretty tired of sitting there OCRing the PDFs manually in Acrobat.
I came across this article by MacWorld which had a great Applescript Folder Action that would kick off Acrobat’s OCR whenever a PDF was dropped into the folder.
It worked well but I found that then I had to sit there and watch the OCR go after each document, and it seemed to have problems if I scanned another file while the OCR was still going.
I wanted a solution where I could just throw a bunch of PDFs at Acrobat and walk away.
Thanks to this thread on MacScripter, I turned the Macworld script into a droplet. Now I just go through and scan a bunch of PDFs to a folder, then drag the files onto the droplet, and go to bed. Acrobat OCRs each one one by one.
Here is the script. You can download it for free, but make sure you go to the Macworld article because it is 90% his work.
To use it:
- Download and uncompress the file and save it to your Desktop, Dock or wherever
- Drag one or more PDFs onto the icon
- Enjoy
Update: User nodis in the comments pointed out a great optimization that makes significantly smaller PDFs. Thanks!
Here is the source code:
property mytitle : "ocrIt-Acrobat" -- Modified from a script created by Macworld http://www.macworld.com/article/60229/2007/10/nov07geekfactor.html
-- I am called when the user open the script with a double click
on run
tell me
activate
display dialog "I am an AppleScript droplet." & return & return & "Please drop a bunch of PDF files onto my icon to batch OCR them." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title mytitle with icon note
end tell
end run
-- I am called when the user drops Finder items onto the script icon
-- Timeout of 36000 seconds to allow for OCRing really big documents
on open droppeditems
with timeout of 36000 seconds
try
repeat with droppeditem in droppeditems
set the item_info to info for droppeditem
tell application "Adobe Acrobat Professional"
activate
open droppeditem
end tell
tell application "System Events"
tell application process “Acrobat”
click the menu item “Recognize Text Using OCR…” of menu 1 of menu item “OCR Text Recognition” of the menu “Document” of menu bar 1
try
click radio button “All pages” of group 1 of group 2 of group 1 of window “Recognize Text”
end try
click button “OK” of window “Recognize Text”
end tell
end tell
tell application “Adobe Acrobat Professional”
save the front document with linearize
close the front document
end tell
end repeat
– catching unexpected errors
on error errmsg number errnum
my dsperrmsg(errmsg, errnum)
end try
end timeout
end open
-- I am displaying error messages
on dsperrmsg(errmsg, errnum)
tell me
activate
display dialog "Sorry, an error occured:" & return & return & errmsg & " (" & errnum & ")" buttons {"Never mind"} default button 1 with icon stop with title mytitle
end tell
end dsperrmsg
My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow – Post Scan Processing
August 11, 2008
This is Part 2 of the My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow series. Make sure to check out Part 1 – ScanSnap Settings.
Now that we have set up ScanSnap Manager with my four profiles, here is what I do with the files.
At first I started using DevonThink Pro Office, but I found that it was a little overkill for my needs. If I had a huge amount of documents that I needed regular access to it would be perfect, but for my home needs I wanted to go with something a little more lightweight.
One main drawback (maybe the only one) is that my ScanSnap S300M did not come with any OCR software in the box. I could download a form to have ReadIris Pro 11 mailed to me, but that didn’t help me at first.
Luckily, I had Adobe Acrobat Professional already, so I decided to use that for my ScanSnap workflow. If you have the ScanSnap S1500 or S1500M, your scanner will come with Acrobat already.
Really Boring, Really Fast
Excited to start OCR’ing up a storm, I set ScanSnap Manager to output to Acrobat and away I went.
It worked quite well. I would hit the button, it would open the resulting file in Acrobat, and then I would go Document | OCR Text Recognition | Recognize Text Using OCR and follow the resulting menus.
I think this would be OK normally, but since I had a ton of things to scan from my file cabinet, this got really boring, really fast to have to sit there and manually OCR every document over and over again. I knew there had to be a better way.
Applescript To The Rescue
I am a complete AppleScript newbie, but I found this great post from Macworld where the author made an AppleScript Folder Action that would watch a certain folder, and when a document got put in it, it would kick off Acrobat (or ReadIris Pro) and OCR it automatically.
I set ScanSnap Manager to save to a folder called ToProcess and gave that folder a Folder Action to run the MacWorld script.
This worked quite well, and would possibly work OK on an ongoing basis, but again I ran into problems when doing my massive scan-a-thon – if i dropped a document in to the folder while the other Acrobat session was still OCR’ing, it would give error messages.
Droplets Are Fun
The solution I came up with was to change the script so that it became a droplet. To do this I ripped off part of the script referenced in this thread.
A droplet is just an Application that you save somewhere (I have it on my Dock). You run it by dragging a file onto its icon.
Here is the script that I cobbled together . Feel free to download and use as you please.
Final Workflow
So now, I have the following workflow:
- Scan document using the ScanSnap, ScanSnap Manager saves the file in the ToProcess folder
- When I am done my batch, I drag the PDF files onto the OCRIt icon, which kicks of Adobe Acrobat Professional and tells it to recognize the text in the document
- When that is done, process/move the files as needed
It is working quite well for you, but I guess if I wanted to avoid all this I could have just stuck with DevonThink as it has built in OCR. What is your workflow? How do you handle the Optical Character Recognition part?
My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow – ScanSnap Settings
August 7, 2008
This is Part 1 of the My ScanSnap Setup And Workflow series. Make sure to check out Part 2 – ScanSnap Post-Scan Processing.
I recently moved and have taken the opportunity to do a massive scan-and-purge-a-thon. Almost every piece of paper from my filing cabinet, and every piece of paper that comes into the house gets fed to my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M and, if appropriate, shredded.
After 2060 sheets scanned so far, I’ve settled on a workflow and some settings, so I thought I would post it here. While they’re for my S300M they should apply for any model.
Profiles
I have four profiles set up in ScanSnap Manager. A profile is basically a collection of settings that you want to use, normally associated with the type of paper that you are scanning.
To create a new profile, go to ScanSnap Manager | Settings, click in the “Select A Profile” dropdown box, and choose Add Profile.
The four profiles I have set up are:
- Standard – Double sided pages, all in one PDF
- Stack Of Double – Double sided pages, one PDF per sheet
- Stack of Single – Single sided pages, one PDF per sheet
- Single All In One – Single sided pages, all in one PDF
Common Settings
There are some settings I have that are common to all 4 profiles:
Application Tab
I have all my profiles set to just scan to a file instead of an application. I will touch on that more in a bit.
Save Tab
The files get saved to a ToProcess folder with the standard filename.
Scanning Tab
To slightly increase the quality without compromising on speed too much, I have Image Quality set to “Better”, with Auto Color Detection.
In addition to the common settings, I have some settings set specifically for each profile
Standard Profile
On the Scanning tab, I have it set to Duplex Scan so that it scans both sides. On the File Option tab, I clicked the Option button and chose “Multipage PDF”. This puts everything in the batch in one PDF file instead of splitting it up.
I also have “Continue scanning after current scan is finished” checked. This is because sometimes I will have large stacks that I want put in one file, but the stack is larger than the ScanSnap 300M can take in one run. By checking this, it will wait and keep adding to the same file after each scan (until I hit Finished).
Stack Of Double Profile
The Stack of Double profile is handy when I have a stack of double sided pages, but i want each page in a separate file. It uses Duplex scanning like in the Standard Profile with two differences:
- I have “Continue scanning after current scan is finished” unchecked on the Scanning tab
- In File Options | Options, I have it set to Generate one PDF file per 2 pages.
Stack of Single Profile
The Stack of Single profile is the same as the Stack of Double, except I have Scanning Side set to Simplex (Single Sided) on the sca nning tab, and “Generate one PDF file per 1 page” set on the File Option | Options screen.
Single All In One Profile
The Single All In One profile has Simplex and “Continue Scanning” set on the Scanning tab and Multipage PDF set in File Options | Options.
Why bother with a Single All In One profile when the ScanSnap removes blank pages? The ScanSnap is great at removing blank pages, but sometimes documents have markings or heavy creases on the back, and the ScanSnap doesn’t pick those up as blanks. Having a Single All In One profile saves me from deleting pages later.
Next time I will cover using OCR software and document management software to actually do something with these newly minted PDFs.
Do you have any other profiles or workflows that you use? Let us know in the comments.
Get Updates!
