Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

Three years ago, my wife and I moved into our new house ((A move that led to the creation of DocumentSnap, actually.)). In the last few weeks we finally started dealing with all the boxes in our garage, and one of them is a big, heavy box of my old college notebooks. It made me remember the ridiculous amount of paper you have to deal with in school, a phenomenon I am getting a new taste of with a son going into Grade 1.

The makers of the Doxie scanner have seen an opportunity here, and have released a new package of their portable scanner for educational users called the Doxie U.

I’ve always wanted to try out the Doxie, so the folks at Apparent sent me a review copy to check out the Doxie/Doxie U (more on the differences later).

What’s In The Box?

When you go to open the box, you right away see the familiar pink-hearted Doxie logo. Some people don’t like the heart motif, but I’m secure in my scanner masculinity so I’m cool with it.

The Doxie U comes with a manual, a USB cable, and a set of cleaning and calibration sheets. Note that there is no power brick.

As you can see on the back of the Doxie, there is just one port – the USB port. A single USB cable powers and operates the scanner, so you don’t need to mess around with looking for a power outlet. I’m starting to think this is a required feature for a portable scanner.

Size

The Doxie is 11.5″ x 2.0″ x 1.6″ (291 mm x 51 mm x 40 mm) and weighs 10.9 oz (309g). It is very slightly larger than other similar scanners like the ScanSnap S1100 and NeatReceipts, but is lighter than the ScanSnap.

To give you some perspective, here is a Doxie compared to a school binder:

Speed

The Doxie’s listed speed is 12 seconds per page. By my math, that is 5 pages per minute. Certainly not as fast as desktop scanners, and not as fast as the ScanSnap, but faster than NeatReceipts.

The 12 seconds a page is their listed speed for 200dpi grayscale. When I scan at 200dpi Color, it takes 20 seconds, which is 3ppm.

My thinking is that if scanning speed is a primary concern, a Doxie is probably not the way you want to be going. That is not a criticism of the Doxie. After all, it is not trying to be an office scanner.

Installation

You may have noticed that there is no CD in the box. The Doxie folks have decided (wisely, in my opinion) to go with download-only for the drivers. I personally think that the optical drive is going the way of the floppy, so I have no problem with this move at all.

There are drivers for both Mac and Windows, so you download the one that you need and install.

The first time you plug in the Doxie, it asks you to calibrate the scanner using the included calibration sheet.

To be honest, I found this a little strange and not the greatest out-of-the-box experience, but I had to do it with the NeatDesk as well. I’m not sure why some scanners need this and some don’t, but I am sure some smart DocumentSnap reader will school me in the comments. Regardless, it was a quick process and I was soon on my way to scanning.

Quality

I will get into the software itself later, but since I am going through specs now, I’ll go through the scan quality. One great thing about the Doxie is that you have a lot of control over scan quality.

As you can see, you can set it anywhere from 75dpi all the way up to 600dpi. The default is 200.

Since quality is so subjective, I will scan both a color magazine page and a black and white typed page at both 200 and 300dpi, and you can judge for yourself.

• Color Document 200dpi
• Color Document 300dpi
• Grayscale Document 200dpi
• Grayscale Document 300dpi

All in all, quite good quality to my laser-surgery’ed eyes.

Software

The software is very easy to use and intuitive. Although the design is quite… pink, I always appreciate software with personality and polish, and the Doxie software certainly has that ((If you really hate the pink, you can change it under Preferences to blue or a simplified UI)).

To scan, you start up the Doxie application.

At the top you choose whether you want to scan a document or a photo, and at the bottom you choose the quality and whether you want black & white, grayscale, or color. When you are ready to scan, you either hit the scan button on the application or on the scanner.

When the scan is complete, it prompts you either save your document or, if you have multiple pages, to add another page.

When you save, you can choose whether to save it to your local drive, to another application, or to the cloud (I’ll get to cloud scanning in a moment). Very handily, it saves your last-saved folders in the list so you can quickly scan to the same location.

As you can see, it comes pre-defined with Evernote, iPhoto, and Preview as local applications (on the Mac, anyways). If you want, under Preferences you can add your own application. I tried scanning to Yep and couldn’t get it to work, but in all honesty I didn’t spend much time troubleshooting. Maybe there is a way to do it that I missed.

Scanning to Evernote, however, worked perfectly. The PDF appeared in a new note in my Evernote client, and was then synced up to the cloud.

Scanning To The Cloud

I have to admit, when the Doxie first launched I shared Joe Kissell’s opinion in his Doxie review. The concept of scanning to the cloud didn’t make a huge amount of sense to me.

However, with Doxie U being targeted at teachers and students, I can see the benefit. I am sure lots of students use Evernote and Google Docs both to store their own documents and to collaborate with others. I can see scanning to cloud services being a great feature.

Doxie has its own cloud service “Doxie Cloud” that you can upload documents to, or you can add your CloudApp, Flickr, Google Docs, Picnik, Scribd, Tubmlr, or Twitter accounts. Some of these are clearly aimed at uploading photos, but let’s look at scanning to Google Docs.

To scan to a cloud service, you scan normally but instead of scanning to a local client, click on the Cloud icon in the top left, and choose your service (in our case Google Docs).

When it finishes uploading, you’ll get a direct URL to your uploaded document.

And here it is, in Google Docs:

What About OCR?

To be honest, I really like the Doxie, but I really dislike the fact that it doesn’t come with OCR software. As you will know if you have been reading this site for any length of time, I am a big believer in making your PDFs searchable if you are going paperless. I think this is especially useful if you are a student or a teacher and want to track down your material. Yes you can use Evernote Premium or Google Docs’ OCR capability, but I think the company should reconsider their stance on this one.

The good news is, the Doxie is much less expensive than most other equivalent scanners, so you can do what this guy did and pick up the Doxie and an inexpensive OCR package if that is a feature that is important to you.

What About TWAIN?

One decision that I do agree with Apparent about is TWAIN support. So, before someone asks, no the Doxie does not support TWAIN. Like the ScanSnap, they are focusing on user experience at the expense of TWAIN support, and I have no problem with that at all. It is an important thing to know if you need to use an application that requires a TWAIN scanner, however.

What Is The Difference Between Doxie and Doxie U?

Great question, I was wondering that too. Here is what Apparent has to say about it on the Doxie U page.

Doxie U. is a specially priced scanner just for teachers and students. It’s functionally equivalent to Doxie, the amazing scanner for documents in both the scanner and included software. The differences are price and accessories: the regular model comes with a carrying case, while the Doxie U. academic version does not. Academic credentials are required to purchase Doxie U. – teachers and students are eligible, worldwide.

So basically, the scanner is the same, the software is the same, but it is only available to academic customers and doesn’t come with the carrying case ((Too bad, the case is quite nice.)).

Bottom Line

I really like the Doxie U scanner, and I wish I had something like it back when I was an eager young Accounting student and swimming in paper.

I wouldn’t recommend it as an office scanner (even a small office). In that case, you are going to want something with a document feeder and something much faster. However, a student or a teacher that wants something portable with a dead simple interface could get a lot of benefit out of it.

Availability

If you are an academic user, you can buy the Doxie U for $119 through the Doxie website. They’ll ask you for your institution and verify academic credentials.

If you’re not a student or teacher, never fear. You can still buy the regular Doxie. If you want to buy me a beverage, you can buy it through Amazon, or if you don’t (that’s cool too), you can buy it through the Doxie store.

Do you use a Doxie? How do you like it?

I have posted about how the Fujitsu ScanSnap is ready for Lion, but what about some of the other popular scanners for going paperless? What is their status on Mac OS X Lion? Let’s find out.

NeatDesk

It looks like NeatDesk for Mac has been updated for Lion. You need to make sure you have at least NeatWorks for Mac 3.5.4 and you should be good to go.

Canon imageFORMULA P-150

I haven’t seen any reports of the Canon P-150 not working on Lion, but when I go to Canon’s Mac Compatibility list or the P-150 product page, I don’t see Lion support or any drivers available. Do you have a P-150? Please leave a note in the comments and let us know how it is going.

Update: Reader Toralf pointed out that the Lion drivers have been posted as of 11/15/2011. You can download them here.

Doxie

Doxie, according to this forum post is fully compatible with Lion. Make sure you grab version 1.4 of the Doxie software.

Epson GT-S50

Like the Canon, the Epson GT-S50 doesn’t actually list Lion drivers on their drivers page, but when you go through the Lion wizard thing for the scanner, it takes you to this page, which explains how to get updated Lion drivers. If you use the Epson GT-S50 on Lion, please leave a note in the comments with how it is going.

That’s a roundup of four of the most common scanners that DocumentSnap users use. If you use another one, let us know in the comments how the upgrade has gone for your scanner.

(Photo by Tambako The Jaguar)

Join the forum discussion on this post

This is a guest post from Michelle Muto, author of the newly released book The Book of Lost Souls.

I’ve slowly been going paperless for about two years. It was part of my new mantra, “Everything you must have owns you.” I cleaned out closets, rooms, cabinets. I saved the worst for last – the dreaded filing cabinets. We had three of them – one a huge desk-length two-drawer behemoth large enough to hide bodies in.

After a couple of weeks in purging paperwork purgatory, I vowed to find a better way. A quick search online told me others were scanning documents. Great idea! Being a die-hard geek, it sounded like fun. Yeah, well, what can I say, right? Except it wasn’t fun. Not until I got my newFujitsu Scansnap S1300 for Christmas.

Now, I actually enjoy it. Yes, I know – I really should get out more.

Anyway, here’s my workflow:

I have a portable file folder where I store all incoming items in appropriate folders. Once a week I scan whatever is in the To Be Scanned folder. I use TextExpander to name things. !wtr becomes Gwinnett Water bill (ironically, the county that wants us to conserve water hasn’t yet embraced conserving trees).

I use TextExpander snippets for the date, too. !ymd becomes 2011-03-09. For monthly bills, I just use year and month since I don’t really care about the actual date. So, !ym !wtr expands to 2011-03 Gwinnett Water Bill.

Then I save the file and let Hazel do the rest.

Remember I said I vowed never to deal with paper again? Well, most of that is because I had to sit for hours to wade through records retention, trying to figure out what stayed and what I could shred.

In my Hazel rule above, notice that I keep files in folders based on groups. Utilities – Phone (cell), Utilities – Water, Insurance – Home, and so on. Yes, OCR helps, but sometimes I can just find things faster in a folder. My digital cabinet is a copy of my physical one. Plus, I use the folders to my advantage for records retention. And once again, Hazel has my back.

Let’s take the water bill. In my state, I really only have to keep it until the next bill arrives. But, I like to keep them for a year. So, I made a Hazel rule that runs on the folder Utilities – Water.

Each parent folder has such a subfolder. And, you’ll notice that I don’t actually delete the file. I just move it. I know I should just let it go and have Hazel delete the file, but I suppose that in a way, my OCD about filing trumps my mantra and still owns me.

Maybe in time. Which, speaking of, going paperless with the help of Brooks, Hazel, and TextExpander gives me more time to do what I love most. Write.

I’m an author, and while I still love holding a book in my hands, I also read more and more ebooks these days. My debut novel, The Book of Lost Souls, is now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for just $1.99 – just in time for Read an Ebook Week. It’s a young-adult fantasy novel.
The sixty second pitch?
It’s not easy being a teen witch. Just ask Ivy MacTavish. Her date for the big dance is really a lizard, a black magic spell book is missing, and a charming demon is offering to help make things right—for a price.

Based on emails I am getting and searches that I can see in the DocumentSnap logs, this question is gaining a bit of steam: “For portable scanners, what is the difference between the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 and the ScanSnap S1100?”, and then of course: “Which should I buy?”.

Since one of the most popular posts on DocumentSnap is the ScanSnap S1100 vs. S1300 comparison, I thought it would be a good time to do a similar thing for the S1300 and S1100.

By the way, if you are comparing them, I have done both a ScanSnap S1300 review and a ScanSnap S1100 review in the past, so it may be worth your while to read those too.

Speed

• S1100: Up to 8 pages per minute, single sided
• S1300: Up to 8 pages per minute, double sided

While both models are nominally 8 pages per minute (or as Fujitsu says for the S1100, 7.5 seconds per page), the S1300 has a big advantage because it is double sided. It would take the S1100 15 seconds to scan a double-sided sheet whereas the S1300 can do it in 7.5.

Capacity

• S1100: 1 sheet
• S1300: Maximum 10 sheets

Clearly the S1300 is the winner here since it can hold ten sheets of paper at a time, whereas the S1100 does not have a document feeder.

Size/Weight

• S1100: 10.74 in. x 1.87 in. x1.33 in. (273mm x 47.5mm x 34mm). .77 lb (350 g).
• S1300: 11.18 in. x 3.90 in. x 3.03 in. (284mm x 99mm x 77mm). 3.08 lb. (1.4kg).

If size and weight are a concern, the S1100 is a clear winner. It is both much smaller and much lighter than the S1300 (especially when you consider the power adapter described in the next section).

Power

• S1100: Powered by a single USB cable, which also acts as the interface to the computer. It does not use an AC adaptor
• S1300: Powered by an AC adaptor, or can be powered by a separate USB cable (meaning it needs two USB ports if you do not use AC)

There isn’t a winner here per se, but the S1100 is much more simple to connect; one USB port and that is it.

Operating System

Fujitsu calls both the S1300 and the S1100 “hybrid scanners”. They are designed to be used both on Windows and the Mac, and come with all the software for both.

Included Software

The ScanSnap S1100 includes the following software:

• ScanSnap Organizer (Windows only)
• CardMinder 4.1 (Windows only)
• ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap (Windows and Mac)
• CardIris 3.6 (Mac only)
• Evernote
• ScanSnap Manager with the ability to scan to Evernote and Google Docs

The ScanSnap S1300 includes the following software:

• ScanSnap Organizer (Windows only)
• CardMinder 4.1 (Windows only)
• ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap (Windows and Mac)
• CardIris 3.6 (Mac only)
• Update 1/25/2012: Fujitsu has released a software update that allows the S1300 to scan directly to Evernote and Google Docs.

Neither the S1300 or the S1100 come with Adobe Acrobat like their big cousins the ScanSnap S1500 and ScanSnap S1500M.

So Which Is Better?

I bet you know what I am going to say here: It depends!

If you have a medium-large and/or regular volume of paper, I strongly urge you to go for the ScanSnap S1300. The extra speed and paper capacity will save you lots of time.

If you have a need to be mobile, or if you do only a small amount of scanning, you can probably get away with the ScanSnap S1100.

If you have a large volume of paper, you will probably be better off with the ScanSnap S1500 or ScanSnap S1500M.

There’s a really interesting article over at the Chronicle of Higher Education about a project by Professor Alexander Halavais’.

Books take up space. That’s a problem for any librarian tasked with finding room on overcrowded shelves. It’s also a problem for a book-loving scholar who lives in a small New York City apartment with a toddler and more than 3,000 books. Under those conditions, something’s got to give. Chances are good it won’t be the toddler.

“First I cut the boards off, and then slice the bindings. I have tried a table saw, but a cheap stack cutter works better. Then I feed [the pages] into my little page-fed scanner, OCR them (imperfectly) using Acrobat, and back them up to a small networked attached storage device.”

As of September, he as 1,000 books in. He’s written a blog post about the process.

It’s funny how cutting up books can provoke such a reaction (see the comments on the Chronicle article: one commenter called it “cannibalism on such a grand scale”). When I think about doing it, my initial reaction is “I can’t do THAT”. However, if I really had to do it, I think I could, at least for the books I am not really really attached to.

How about you, could you take a stack cutter to your books? Anyone done it already? Leave a comment and let us know how it worked out for you.

(Photo by nSeika)

Some time ago, I posted an article about how to use NeatWorks for Mac with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. In case you don’t know, NeatWorks is the software that comes with the NeatDesk and NeatReceipts scanner. Neatco sells the Mac version separately (though not the Windows version for some strange reason).

At the time, I was using a ScanSnap S300M and the latest desktop scanner was the S510M. Since then, I have had a lot of people ask if NeatWorks will work with newer ScanSnaps such as the ScanSnap S1500, the ScanSnap S1300, or the ScanSnap S1100.

The strange thing is, apparently if you ask, Neat is telling people that only the S510M and S300M are officially supported and newer ScanSnaps probably won’t work.

That sounded wacky to me, so I decided to try it out using the exact same profile that I had created back in that original post.

First I tried scanning to NeatWorks with my S1300:

Then I tried with a S1100:

In both cases the scanning appears to have worked fine.

Keep in mind that it seems to be Neat’s official position that it won’t work, so you are probably not going to get any help from them doing this, so caveat emptor.

Anyone run into any problems using NeatWorks with their newer ScanSnap?

Back in January, DocumentSnap reader Jos van de Voort van de Kleij wrote in with a question: How could he use his ScanSnap S1300 to scan directly to his OmniFocus inbox?

Now, despite the writing and podcasting of David Sparks, Ben Brooks, and Merlin Mann, I have not yet taken the plunge and started using OmniFocus. However, I was at Macworld at the time, so I went to the Omni booth to ask for suggestions, and they pointed me to the Omni Forums.

After some great help from the Omni folks, Jos has worked out a workflow that lets him scan to his OmniFocus Inbox. Now, why would he want to do this? Here are his words:

Remember: this workflow allows you to create paperless “ticklers” in OmniFocus therefore eliminating the need for the 43 folders as described in the book by David Allen. As an example you could scan a bill, give it a “pay by” date and it will disappear from your radar until the date comes to pay the bill. You will have the scan of the bill to support preparing the payment. When done you click the action completed and it goes away automatically. Yet another step in going paperless!

Sounds good to me. Here are the steps to get it done.

Set Up The A Folder Action

• Download the OmniFocus Applescript to somewhere on your computer
• Unzip it
• Drop the script into this folder:Macintosh HD>Library>Scripts>Folder Action Scripts
• Find or create a folder that you are going to want to scan/save to
• Right-click on this folder, and select Services>Folder Actions Setup

• Select the “Add files as OmniFocus actions” script

• Click Attach

Now you have a folder where any time a file gets saved there, it automatically gets imported to OmniFocus.

Set Up Your Scanner

Set up your scanner to scan to this folder (in my case I called it “To OmniFocus”).

If you are using a ScanSnap, you can set up a profile for this.

On the Application tab, choose Scan To File (or, if you want to be able to rename it first, Scan To Folder)

On the Save tab, browse to your OmniFocus scan folder that you created earlier.

For the rest of the tabs, set whichever options you prefer.

Scan To OmniFocus!

Once this is all set up, you are good to go. Select your OmniFocus profile, hit Scan, and the Quick Entry window should pop up.

Do whatever you OmniFocus people do there, and hit Save. The task will then be created with your scanned document as an attachment in your OmniFocus Inbox.

Since we’re talking OmniFocus, any other OF devotees out there that have tips or tricks for how they reference their documents from it? Let us know in the comments.

I have a theory, based on no data whatsoever, that Fujitsu is going to sell a lot of ScanSnap S1100 scanners to people who already have another ScanSnap.

Your average home or small business user will most likely not need multiple scanners, but I could see people who travel a lot, visit client sites, or hit trade shows benefiting from having the S1100 as their portable scanner while leaving their S1500, S1500M, or S1300 back at the office. At a sub-$200 price point, this lets them have a the best of both worlds: a fast and high powered dual sided scanner at the office, and a fast and mobile scanner on the go.

This got me thinking: how nicely does the S1100′s software play with other ScanSnaps? To find out, I’ve been running my ScanSnap S1300 with the S1100′s software for the past month or so on my Mac. A few notes about this not-at-all-scientific test:

• I’ve only been doing this heavily on my Mac. I assume Windows results are similar, but haven’t dug too deeply
• I don’t have a S1500 or S1500M, so while I assume results with those scanners are similar, I can only speak to the S1300 from first hand experience
• I have no clue what Fujitsu’s official policy is on running newer software with older scanners. If you ever need to contact Fujitsu support about something, they may (?) give you a hard time

Profile Migration

I was very happy to see that my old ScanSnap Manager profiles were carried over when I installed the S1100′s software. They also did this when I upgraded from the S300M to the S1300. This is a very nice touch for power users.

Scanning With Old Profiles

Scanning with my pre-S1100 profiles on the ScanSnap S1300 continued to work with no problems that I could see. You can see that the “scanning” progress window has a new look.

Scan To Evernote

One nice thing about the S1100 is that it will now scan directly to Evernote, meaning that you don’t need to do any ScanSnap Evernote integration tomfoolery. Is that a hardware or a software thing? Let’s find out.

In ScanSnap Manager there are two new options for the Application tab: Scan To Evernote (Document) and Scan To Evernote (Note).

In case you’re wondering what the difference is, Document will attach the scan as a PDF to a new note whereas Note will embed the pages as JPGs in new notes.

On the Scanning tab, with the S1300 turned on, you can see that we have the option for both double-sided and single-sided scanning.

Lets try scanning a double-sided document using Scan To Evernote (Document) on the S1300.

Hey look, it worked.

One interesting note, when I have the S1100 plugged in and turned on and go into that Scan To Evernote profile, on the Scanning Tab I now only have the option to scan single-sided.

Scan To Google Docs

Now let’s try to scan to Google Docs using the S1300. Here is the Application settings button of a new Scan To Google Docs profile I have created.

Looking good!

…and, there it is in Google Docs scanned with my ScanSnap S1300.

Scan With Both ScanSnaps Plugged In

What happens when you have both ScanSnaps plugged in and turned on at the same time? Will a hole open up in the space-time continuum?

Looks like those killjoys at Fujitsu were one step ahead of me.

So, there you go. As far as I can tell, as long as you are using only one ScanSnap at at time, using older models like the ScanSnap S1300 will work fine with the ScanSnap S1100′s software.

Have you tried running multi-ScanSnap? Let us know your experiences in the comments.

Fujitsu has been making the ScanSnap line of document scanners for quite some time, and they’ve finally made a truly portable version: the ScanSnap S1100.

Until now their most portable scanner has been the ScanSnap S1300, which while smaller than its desktop cousins the S1500 and S1500M, isn’t something you are just going to throw in your bag as you are heading out the door.

The S1100 is a “hybrid” scanner in that it works with both the Mac and PC. Fujitsu calls it an “ultra-portable” scanner and they are clearly targeting people who are on-the-go as well as people for whom desk (or cafe table) space is at a premium.

I was sent a review unit of the S1100 so I thought I’d break it down for the DocumentSnap readers.

Size

Ultra-portable is a pretty good description. This thing is small. I had my first indication of this when I received the box. I was pretty surprised how tiny the box was. Here it is in comparison to a shoebox. My first thought was “is assembly required?”. Thankfully, it was not.

Once I had it unpacked, the S1100 is 10.74 x 1.87 x 1.33 inches. That’s smaller than other similar scanners in its class. Weight wise, it is 12.3 ounces.

For people who are familiar with other ScanSnaps, here it is in comparison to the ScanSnap S1300:

The ScanSnap gets all of its power from one USB cord. No AC adaptor, no dual-USB cord like the S1300, just one cord. In fact, as you can see, it doesn’t even have a port for an AC adaptor:

Two-Way Paper Path

One of the knocks against other ScanSnaps is that paper can’t go through “flat”, but needs to go through the scanner’s “L-turn” (I have no idea what the technical term is there).

The S1100 solves this in a pretty clever way.

If you leave the top of the scanner closed, paper will be fed straight through like most portable scanners. You put the paper in the front, and it comes straight out the back. This is great if you are scanning photos, business cards, post cards, plastic cards (!), and extra-delicate paper.

If space is at a premium or if you are doing a lot of scanning (more on that in a minute), you can flip the top up. When you do that, you feed the paper in the front and it turns it up and flips it back to you. Very smart.

I found that for magazines articles, scanning using the turn-path (with the top flipped up) worked better than scanning it straight through. Maybe the paper is a bit too thin for the rollers that feed it through the back.

Multiple-Page Scanning

When you think about it, this scanner is a bit of a risk for Fujitsu. The ScanSnap brand has been built on “throw a stack of paper in, hit the button, and you have fast double-sided scanning in one pass”. The S1100 will take neither a stack of paper nor will scan double-sided in one pass.

My personal theory, with no evidence whatsoever, is that the company took their time introducing an ultra-portable scanner similar to the way that Apple took their time bringing copy & paste to the iPhone; they wanted to wait until they could figure out a “ScanSnap-y” way to do it.

If you have double sided documents or a stack of pages, the ScanSnap S1100 has what they are calling “Continuous Document Feeding”. Here’s how it works:

• You flip the top of the scanner up
• You put the first page in the front of the scanner, and you can feel it grab the paper a little bit
• You hit the scan button and it feeds the page through
• Since the top is up, it returns the paper to you
• If you want to scan the back of the paper, you just feed in the already-flipped page on the other side. You don’t need to hit anything
• If you want to scan the next page of the document, you just feed in the next page. You don’t need to hit anything
• When you’re done the document, just hit the Scan button again and it will then save and (if you desire) OCR the PDF

Pretty clever use of just one button if you ask me.

Speed

The ScanSnap S1100 scans a page in 7.5 seconds. If my math is right, which it usually is not, that makes it 8 pages per minute. That is obviously slower than the rest of the ScanSnap family, but it is faster than other ultra-portable scanners. You probably wouldn’t want to run your law office off a S1100, but that is not what it is for anyways.

Quality

I am pretty impressed at the scan quality of the S1100, to be honest. Since quality is pretty subjective, I scanned a few documents with both the S1100 and the S1300 for you to compare:

• Here is a magazine article scanned with the S1100
• Here is the same magazine article scanned with the S1300
• Here is a menu scanned with the S1100
• Here is the same menu scanned with the S1300

Installation

Installation is easy as always. You just pop in the DVD and it installs everything you need. Then you plug in the one USB cable and you are good to go.

I installed the software on my Mac which already had the S1300′s software installed and it recognized my old profiles. A nice touch.

Software

Here is the software that the S1100 comes with:

• ScanSnap Manager (Mac and Windows)
• ScanSnap Organizer 4.1 (Windows only)
• CardMinder 4.1 (Windows only)
• ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap (Windows and Mac)
• CardIris 3.6 (Mac only)
• Evernote 3.5 (Windows) or 1.1 (Mac)

So, it comes with the scanning drivers for both platforms, PDF organization software for Windows, business card software for both platforms, and OCR software for both platforms.

By the way, it also comes with a printed manual. Not many devices come with those anymore!

Evernote Integration

You might have noticed that Evernote comes on the DVD. Why is that you might ask? Well, the ScanSnap S1100 now features “scan to the cloud” functionality and has support for scanning to Evernote.

Longtime DocumentSnap readers will know that it has been possible to integrate the ScanSnap with Evernote for quite some time, but now you don’t need to mess around with setting up profiles anymore. It’s built into the Quick Menu.

I tested it out and it works well. Throw in a document, hit scan, choose Evernote from the Quick Menu (or make your own profile if you’d like) and it will import it to your Evernote local client to be synced up.

Google Docs Integration

Evernote is not the only cloud service supported. The S1100 also has support for Google Docs built in to ScanSnap Manager. When you scan, it asks you for your Google Docs (Google Apps works too) credentials which you can save or not, and then it uploads as a PDF right into Google Docs.

Cleaning

You know how sometimes you scan a page that has some glue or something on it and you then need to clean the scanner? Like other ScanSnap models, the S1100 will open up so that you can clean the inside. That’s a pretty helpful feature since given the portable nature of this thing, I can see it being used in some pretty funky situations.

Bottom Line?

All in, I think the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 is a good choice if you need a fast portable scanner. As I said, you probably wouldn’t want to run your whole office on it (though you could!), but for light home use and particularly for travel use, it is a good mix of size, speed, and the normal ScanSnap touches.

For me, it wouldn’t replace my ScanSnap S1300 because I like having a document feeder and double-sided scanning, but if I traveled a lot I could see myself using it for sure.

Normally I would have a video showing all this stuff, but for a variety of technical reasons that has to wait for a few days. When I have one up, I will post it.

Availability

Apparently it is released today, but I don’t see it on any online sites yet. As soon as I see it on Amazon etc., I’ll let you know. The retail price is $199 USD.

Update: It is now on Amazon.

Are you going to get one? What are your thoughts about the ScanSnap going ultra-portable? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a great one and are ready and roaring to go for 2011.

As part of my annual review, I was looking back at my logs for sales through Amazon.com, and I thought you might be interested in the top 10 products that DocumentSnap readers bought through Amazon in 2010.

Here it is in pie chart (mmm… pie) form:

Here are the top 10 products:

1. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300: Fujitsu’s personal Mac & Windows document scanner. A little surprised this one was #1 to be honest!
2. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M: Fujitsu’s Mac desktop scanner. Mac users are representing!
3. Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500: Fujitsu’s Windows desktop scanner
4. Western Digital Elements 2TB External Drive: Happy to see my favorite external drive listed here
5. Neatco NeatDesk: Neatco’s desktop scanner including the NeatWorks software that a lot of people like
6. ScanSnap Carrying Case: Can’t say I realized so many people use a carrying case for their S1500, but guess I was wrong!
7. Doxie: Apparent’s ultra portable scan-to-cloud scanner
8. NeatReceipts: Neatco’s portable receipt scanner (as the name implies)
9. Fellowes P-57Cs Shredder: Light duty home or home office cross-cut shredder
10. Fellowes SB-99Ci Shredder: Small business cross-cut shredder

So there you go. This list tells me two things:

1. DocumentSnap readers love their ScanSnaps (no surprise)
2. I clearly need to diversify my coverage a bit more (again, not really a surprise, but ignore what I just said until after tomorrow’s post)

Thanks to all the DocumentSnap readers that bought their paperless products through my Amazon links this year. I (or more accurately, Starbucks) thank you very much.

(Photo by Jude Doyland)