How To Use A Windows ScanSnap On A Mac

Update: It’s confirmed that the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M include both drivers on the install CD. See this ScanSnap Cross-Platform post for more info. The rest of this post relates to the S510 and s300 series.

According to commenter “rei” on this ScanSnap S1500 post, the next version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap is going to work on both Mac and Windows – the only difference between the S1500 and S1500M is the bundled software.

If that is the case, that will be tremendous, but that doesn’t help you if you have an older ScanSnap for Windows that you want to use on your shiny new Mac.

It is possible to do, but believe it or not you have to hunt down some Japanese drivers to do it.

Here is a roundup of some links that show you how it is done.

The Mac Lawyer has an excellent step by step guide. Make sure you read all the way down through the comments as there are updated links to the driver software there. While the ScanSnap model that Ben is referring to is the 5110EOX2, some commenters have noted that they have got it working with newer ScanSnaps like the S300.

A link in the comments of the Mac Lawyer post led me to the My Punchbowl Blog. Scroll down to #10 in the list for a discussion of how he got the S510 working on his new Mac.

The granddaddy of all cross-platform-ScanSnap information is this MacOSXHints forum thread. It is long and goes on for a wide time period, so you may want to start at the end and work backwards to go by the newest information.

So, while I wouldn’t say getting a Windows ScanSnap working on the Mac is easy, it is clearly do-able. Have you ever “crossed the aisle” and got your ScanSnap working cross-platform? Leave your war story in the comment.

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About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 13 comments

Matt Douglas - October 18, 2010 Reply

You missed one GREAT link. This solved my problem! http://techenvy.com/hack/mac-osx-drivers-for-wind…

Brooks Duncan - October 18, 2010 Reply

That's an awesome post Matt.. thanks so much for sharing.

racerx90 - April 7, 2010 Reply

Latest patches for V2.2 L11, V2.2 L12, and V3.0 L20W (patches the dmg file directly!!) can be found here:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showpost.php?p=5782…

racerx90 - April 7, 2010 Reply

Latest patches for V2.2 L11, V2.2 L12, and V3.0 L20W (patches the dmg file directly!!) can be found here:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showpost.php?p=5782…

Garret - April 3, 2010 Reply

Here's a good concise way to get your windows s300 working on a Mac:
http://techenvy.com/hack/mac-osx-drivers-for-wind…

There's all sorts of info online about how to do this, but these are the instructions that worked for my MacBook pro.

Brooks Duncan - April 3, 2010 Reply

Thanks for posting that Garret!

Tullio - May 9, 2009 Reply

I've received a mail from a Fujitsu representative, and he asserted that you only have to change the software driver with the S1500.

Brooks Duncan - May 9, 2009 Reply

Thanks Tullio. I've received confirmation from Fujitsu as well and should have updated this post. More info is here: http://www.documentsnap.com/fujitsu-scansnap-s150…

racerx90 - April 19, 2009 Reply

Honestly, the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners are really great – no complaints whatsoever except for one. Having switched to a Mac laptop for my new job ended up orphaning my S300 scanner (expensive paperweight) with no way to work on the Mac (it's ridiculous that Fujitsu does this) and I wasn't about to buy another one.

I tried just about everything to get the S300 scanner working with the MAC driver under OS X (including the resource swap trick with the Japanese driver – but it doesn't support S300, not to mention it's a complete waste of time), but it just doesn't work. Even though most of the code is in the MAC driver to support all of the PC-based ScanSnap scanners – Fujitsu just disables it in the initialization routine based on DevID's.

Essentially what I found out after a lot of testing is that there's no discernible difference between the the PC-variant and the MAC-variant scanner hardware – even the firmware for the S300 line is software loaded from the driver. The only real difference is the PCI Device IDs (0x117F vs. 0x1156), which holds true for the rest of the ScanSnap scanners.

After months of procrastinating I decided that I had enough of the VMware solution and decided to just do a binary patch for the ScanSnap Manager software for the Mac and add support for all the ScanSnap scanners. Now the S300, S500, S510, and fi-5110EOX/2/3 scanners will work under OSX with the latest V2.2 L11 Mac ScanSnap drivers from Fujitsu (which was designed to work with the S300M, S500M, S510M and fi-5110EOXM scanners.) Go to forums at MAC OS X Hints, read through the thread to find the installation instructions and you will also find a link to download the patches that I created ( http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=52… ). It's a simple 1-step process to do the patch (just drag the ScanSnap Manager application on the patch utility and it does all the work for you plus it supports multiple languages!)

Finally, I also figured out and documented how to use MAC-based ScanSnap scanners on PCs (Windows) with a 1-line change to the device drivers. It's in the same MAC OS X Hints thread I linked to above.

This should eliminate *all* cross-platform incompatibilities with the Scanners and the corresponding drivers.

Hopefully that will help others.

Randy - August 13, 2012 Reply

Racer, is there any chance you will be updating this to work with OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion?

Joseph - March 19, 2009 Reply

Lots of people want to know how to get the Windows ScanSnap to work on a Mac, but I wonder about the Mac version on Windows. I do a fair bit of stuff in VMWare Fusion, and it would probably be useful to be able to use there once in awhile.

Perhaps I just want to create a profile for scanning to a shared folder as PDF? That seems annoying, because frankly the Mac is a lot better at dealing with PDFs than Windows is (though FineReader for ScanSnap is possibly annoying to use in that case, unless someone figures out how it identifies a PDF as coming from the ScanSnap and builds a droplet to “fix” that–unless I just decide DevonThink is the ultimate solution?)

I wonder.

Brooks Duncan - March 17, 2009 Reply

@Simon: The two machines are definitely different (as you say the Mac one is white and the PC one is black) but what is not clear to me is if the internals are different. I am hearing different things. I have reached out to a contact I have at Fujitsu to find out the deal.

As for the S1500M, a new press release just came out today (http://www.fujitsu.com/us/news/pr/fcpa_20090317-0… and I can see the s1500 on the Fujitsu online store. It's not in Amazon or Buy.com yet though. But, according to Fujitsu, it's released in the US now!

Simon - March 10, 2009 Reply

According to this latest press release (http://www.fujitsu.com/emea/news/pr/fel-en_20090303-1.html) of 3rd March, the 1500 and 1500M are not the same product with different software. The photos clearly show the 1500 is black while the 1500M is white.

I have been trying to find more information about where to buy the 1500M. According to that press release, it was available to purchase from 3rd March. I still can’t find it anywhere!