Does The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 OCR Use A Lot Of CPU?

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In the comments to my ScanSnap S1300 review post, user pendolino asked about the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1300‘s performance, not so much the scanner itself, but the software and OCR process afterwards.

i would like to know a bit more about the very interesting sounding OCR feature that you say is bundled within the software (both mac and win) and, from your screenshot, seems to be different and separate from Adobe Acrobat. how fast does it OCR a B&W page of standard text? does it do it seamlessly? is it heavy on a Mac CPU slowing down other running applications, etc?

I couldn’t think of a better way to answer this question than to do a video of scanning and OCRing a document, so that’s what I did.

Now, obviously a lot of this depends on the computer. I am doing this on a slightly old MacBook Pro with a 2.5 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor and 4 Gigs of RAM. It’s going to be different for you if you have Windows, or different specs, or whatever, but hopefully this will give you an idea.

Hope this helps!

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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 9 comments

Maggie - December 2, 2010 Reply

Hi,
will the Scansnap S1300 work on the new MACBOOK AIR 11,6" (the one with 2 USB-ports) without being hooked to the wallplug? Maybe ONLY one of the 2 available USB-ports on the MBA 11,6" is powered.

Thanks.

Brooks Duncan - December 3, 2010 Reply

That's a good question. I doubt Apple would do that, as it would mean that you could only plug the Superdrive into one of the ports and I don't see anything to indicate that.

Having said that, I don't have one so I am only going on a quick Google search. It might be worth posting on the Apple forums and seeing what people have to say about the power situation.

Maggie - December 3, 2010 Reply

In case you`ll find out something on that, please keep me informed.

Thanks a lot.

Maggie

Adobe Cheap - July 2, 2010 Reply

thanks, superb well made out info, got it by means a search and i writed it on my zimbio

Matthew K - April 15, 2010 Reply

With my s1500m I use a script to save all the OCRing for when I'm done scanning. It was immensely valuable when I first started with boxes of documents to go through. I would scan for an hour or two at night, then let my similarly equipped macbook pro OCR for a couple hours after I went to sleep.

The script is available here for anyone who's interested: http://gist.github.com/321839

Brooks Duncan - April 15, 2010 Reply

Thanks for this Matthew! This is wicked!

Buddy - July 28, 2011 Reply

Wham bam thank you, ma’am, my questions are awnersed!

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pendolino - April 10, 2010 Reply

i just watched the video and the OCR is super fast especially when compared to the time Adobe Acrobat 7 used to take (came bundled with S510M). in that version, Acrobat would have to launch (a slow process) and then it would take a while to go through the document and really disrupted workflow as you'd also have to save, etc.

this new setup looks very smooth and integrated much better.

i think you've convinced me to pick up a new scansnap =)