Comments on: How To Use A Windows ScanSnap On A Mac – Link Roundup

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:14:06 +0000

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

By: Matt Douglas

Matt Douglas — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:00:17 +0000

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

By: racerx90

racerx90 — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:26:42 +0000

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...

By: racerx90

racerx90 — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:26:42 +0000

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...

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 17:19:04 +0000

Thanks for posting that Garret!

By: Garret

Garret — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:17:53 +0000

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.

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:02:08 +0000

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...

By: Tullio

Tullio — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:54:29 +0000

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

By: racerx90

racerx90 — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:32:34 +0000

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. 0×1156), 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 ( ” target=”_blank”>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.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:03:17 +0000

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.