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.
