Fujitsu ScanSnap on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard - Your Experiences?

Fujitsu ScanSnap on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard – Your Experiences?

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Update Nov 13, 2009: The Snow Leopard fix has been released. See this for more information!

Since Apple’s new version of OSX – 10.6 aka Snow Leopard is released today, I thought I’d make this post so that we can share our experience using the Fujitsu ScanSnap with it.

I haven’t found any indication that 10.6 is officially supported by Fujitsu yet, but I have seen mixed reviews online.

Update: Fujitsu has reached out to me and also posted on Twitter via their @ScanSnapIT account the status of Snow Leopard support. For ScanSnap S300M, S500M, S510M, and S1500, scanning is supported on Snow Leopard, but Quick Menu does not work and Scan to Folder currently does not work.

Fujitsu Customer Support has posted this bulletin listing the workarounds and support status. They expect it to be fixed “within 2009”.

This tweet by user @tedlandau makes it look like Snow Leopard is working with the ScanSnap:

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However, I also came across this ars technica forum thread saying that at least one user has had problems scanning to PDF using the ScanSnap S510M.

I haven’t tried Snow Leopard myself yet and haven’t heard back from Fujitsu regarding their support for it, but have you had any experiences one way or the other with it? Leave your feedback in the comments.

Update: Just came across another tweet from user @TaxMan45 saying that he chatted with Fujitsu Support and that the ScanSnap 510M is compatible with Snow Leopard, but not in Quick Menu mode.

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Update: There is an update from Fujitsu that the Snow Leopard fix will be ready at the end of November.

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 68 comments

Rod - July 27, 2010 Reply

I am experiencing blurry scans where the text has a shadow effect. Today, I had an interesting problem – the image scan was clear but the OCR scan was blurry. How do I fix this problem?

    Brooks Duncan - July 29, 2010 Reply

    Hi Rod, sorry for the delay in responding. What are you using to do the OCR? A separate program or the OCR built into ScanSnap Manager? What version of ScanSnap are you using?

Jonas - July 24, 2010 Reply

Hi, or just get EVERNOTE to go with it – fantastic piece of software – it takes the scanned "image" PDF and converts magazines etc. into searchable text. Works flawless!

    Brooks Duncan - July 24, 2010 Reply

    Hey Jonas, totally agree re: Evernote. I'm a fan too. If you want to see some of the stuff I've written about it on this site, you can head here: http://www.documentsnap.com/tag/evernote/

Henrik - January 5, 2010 Reply

Thanks for the reply. I did find, in another post, a download link to Abbyy Finereader from the Fujitsu website, can I not use this download with the 300M?
Or is there another OCR software that would set me back less than the price premium of the 1500?
Thanks, Henrik

Henrik - January 4, 2010 Reply

Hi there,

I have a Mac running Snow Leopard and am wondering whether to get the 300M or 1500M scanner – or wait for the 1300M? I would like to create searchable PDFs – do I need the 1500 model for this?

Thanks a lot, Henrik

Chris - January 4, 2010 Reply

Jeff, please see this post and its comments: http://www.documentsnap.com/fujitsu-scansnap-upda…

Jeff in KC - January 2, 2010 Reply

I'm stuck. I installed the "22L11" update from the Fujitsu site because I didn't see the special Snow Leopard update. It installed but wouldn't save to file. So I went back to the site, and found the Snow Leopard update. Downloaded it, but can't install because it wants the previous version. I get the error "Cannot run the update because the target ScanSnap Manager is not installed"
I restored the 2.1 version from TimeMachine – still, no luck with the SnowLeopard installed.
Any hints on getting the new update to run/install would be most appreciated.

Erik Contzius - November 18, 2009 Reply

I have to say I'm terribly disappointed with Fujitsu on this one. I have the first generation ScanSnap which I've been using for close to four years now. I upgraded to Snow Leopard knowing full well that there was going to be an updater for the software. But guess what? Fujitsu doesn't support its own hardware in 4th generation. In other words, if you buy from Fujitsu and computer technology is more than 4 years old, you now have a large paperweight on your desk. They told me that they will not support my model of ScanSnap at all to work with 10.6! Really??? How bad is this for the environment alone?? My HP printer of more than 10 years works great with my computer. Harumph.

    Chris Murphy - November 18, 2009 Reply

    @Erik, I can sympathize with how you feel about it. I can understand Fujitsu wanting to sunset support for older models like yours, though, as I'm guessing you're a minority in terms of supporting your model for the latest OS X OS.

    As for HP printers, I have a DeskJet that's eight years old and SL doesn't have driver support for it (Leopard did). In SL, I had to manually select a model "close" to mine and luckily it still works.

mjcmjc - November 17, 2009 Reply

What about Sharing the Fujitsu Scanner via Snow Leopard's Sharing function in System Preferences?

The November update allowed us to scan to folder again (previously, we could just scan to email), but we are still unable to share this scanner on the LAN via System Preferences -> Sharing -> Scanner Sharing.

Anyone know who to share this scanner?

    Brooks Duncan - November 18, 2009 Reply

    Sorry mjcmjc, this topic has come up few times and no one (to my knowledge) has figured out how to share a ScanSnap. If anyone does, let us know!

Arnold Stolberg - November 16, 2009 Reply

Thanks, it works. I appreciate your letting us know of the update. I had gotten used to my roundabout solution.

Chris Murphy - November 15, 2009 Reply

Fujitsu announced a Snow Leopard update two days ago on Twitter:

Snow Leopard Update for ScanSnap : FUJITSU United States
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peri…

After updating, "Scan to Folder" still crashed on me, so I quit ScanSnap Manager and removed any preference files starting with "jp.co.pfu.ScanSnap.*" under ~/Library/Preferences/. This blew away my profiles, which I recreated, and now "Scan to Folder" and Quick Menu features work.

I'm happy it work again, but am annoyed it took Fujitsu so long for the update, considering they knew Snow Leopard was coming for over a year.

Suzatlarge - November 13, 2009 Reply

In my experience Fujitsu has always been slow to provide updated drivers and software for its ScanSnap desktop machines. Windows Vista was released to the public in January 2007, but Fujitsu didn't provide Vista drivers until June or July 2007. This meant that I couldn't use my ScanSnap for 3 or 4 months after replacing my PC with a Vista machine. In 2008 I switched to an iMac but I do like the ScanSnap so I also got a model S510M. Now we're waiting for an update to the drivers – same story, different OS, different year. BTW I've been using the ScanSnap as usual, but then I open Documents -> ScanSnap and find the latest one is saved as "untitledxxxx.pdf" where xxxx is a 4-digit number starting at 0001. Each new document is assigned the next number in the series. It's a bit less streamlined than scan to folder but once I figured out where my new pdfs were going, it's just a few clicks to open each new one, name it and save it in the right place.

Finis Price - November 9, 2009 Reply

I made a quick video tutorial on how to set up Profiles which solves this problem.
http://www.technoesq.com/law-office-use/2009/11/0…

Finis Price
http://www.TechnoEsq.com

Aerospace - November 6, 2009 Reply

Getting a bit off topic, but how do you run a batch OCR in Acrobat? Can't work it out. I need the FineReader bit the most, and it's a real pain that the 2 components won't work together now.

Steven - October 15, 2009 Reply

I just scan to PDF and it works fine. I sure wish Fujitsu would get their act together.

Seattle Lawyer - October 13, 2009 Reply

I was going to update to Snow Leopard (today) and stumbled onto this. As a person who has championed this hardware, I am deeply disappointed that Fujitsu has not addressed the problems listed. Looking forward to the update. Until then, Snow Leopard disk sits in a drawer.

Ewaz - September 25, 2009 Reply

I was about to buy the Scan Snap S1500 but saw the reviews on Amazon about Snow Leopard. As I have already installed Snow Leopard I am going to wait until I see that Fujitsuhas corrected this problem.

Salvatore - September 24, 2009 Reply

After updated to Mac OS 10.6 the function scan to file doesn’ t work.
This is reale a big problem to me .I think is better to inform all scansnap users to stop the migration to Snow Leopard.

jackie_l - September 24, 2009 Reply

I just got the Scan Snap S1500M and was wondering why the Quick Menu didn't work until I read these posts and was pretty frustrated. But i think I've worked out a way to scan to file. I just create a Profile for a folder that I use a lot, and set it up so that when I scan a large number of files it goes to that folder. Then in the finder, I use Quick Look to see which file it is and rename the scans right there. I haven't tried OCR while scanning because I heard that Acrobat does batch OCR much more quickly. Not the greatest setup but it seems to be working so far.

Kelly Spongberg - September 23, 2009 Reply

I upgraded several of our workstations to 10.6 before realizing the scan to folder was broken. I'll hold off doing any more 10.6 upgrades until the new software is released. Fujitsu is not alone in this, Dymo products that worked fine with our macs now are unusable, also waiting for a new software version. I should have waited…

Gary - September 17, 2009 Reply

ScanSnap S510M and snow leopard upgrade. My scansnap will only scan for email and not to the designated folder. When scanning for email, it saves a copy in the designated folder, when you rename the saved file, you cannot attach that file to an email in entourage. It causes entourage to crash every time you try to attach a file created by scan snap in the file folder.

rliuzza - September 11, 2009 Reply

The patch seems to work fine with my S300M — it replaces the .plist file in your preferences folder (~/Library/preferences). Once installed, you can go into the ScanSnap Settings and change the default application that opens the scan (from Acrobat to Preview, or whatever you like) and the location to which scans are automatically saved.

JonLee - September 11, 2009 Reply

I complained to Fujitsu last week, and they answered back that Apple came out with Snow Leopard two months before originally scheduled and suggested that maybe I should complain to Apple. I get it–it's someone else's fault.