ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner

I bought this so I could send faxes from home. I know, you can get fax machines for much less, but I didnt want to mess with shared lines or installing a separate line. The image quality on scanned sheets is great, it automatically saves the file as a pdf and it integrated perfectly with my MacBook Pro. The files work fine with my online fax service and the pdf format makes file handling simple for emails, file sharing, etc. Its a little challenging to get the paper to feed straight for the scan (especially a multi-page scan), but thats the only (minor) issue Ive had with this unit.

We bought this scanner a few years ago after doing a lot of research. I think it paid for itself in terms of time saved, within the first month of use. It has continued to give us outstanding service all this time. I never had much success with the Cardiris but we have been so thrilled with its other functions that this is a minor regret. We are getting ready to buy a new one (newer model?) for home and bring the old one to our second house because, no matter where you are, there are always papers to be reckoned with, and this little machine makes short work of them!

The speed at which this product scans the paper is amazing. And it scans both sides at the same time. Butter my butt and call me a biscuit. Im impressed. Im horrible at keeping up with paperwork and Im hopeful that this will help my ADD self get a little more organized. When the kids bring papers home, calendars, phone lists, field trip permission slips, fundraiser paperwork.. I will scan it so WHEN (not IF) I lose it, I can reprint it. YES. Ive been saving my sons Kindergarten work but I decided to scan it and save it. INCREDIBLY fast and does a beautiful job. I like to think Im up to date on the latest and greatest but Ive never seen anything work this well. I scanned documents that I know I couldnt replace if I lost them.. I scanned artwork from my kids.. things that Id like to keep but with 6 kids I just dont have room to keep the original items. What a great product. Worth the price.

Ive used a few auto-feed scanners over the years from Visioneer and HP in an attempt to create a paperless home office. All of them have had one thing in common. They were frustrating to use. They jammed frequently, had poor drivers, etc. This one does not fit that profile. I was initially a bit leary of the price. $400+ for a home scanner was a bit of a pill to swallow. Having used this scanner for a few months now, Id have to say Id be willing to pay more! It is an absolute joy to use. It plows through my bills, receipts, statements, whatever, with not a single hiccup. It hardly even blinks when I give it crinkled and folded paper (although it has its limits). I got a pleasant surprise recently when I decided to scan a bunch of store receipts. You know the 3-inch wide by 12 inch long kind? No problem. Even if the auto-feeder sucked it through a little crooked, the software straightened it right back out. Wow. ...and the speed. Holy cow. It flies. Having a full Acrobat Pro license included is a heck of a nice bonus.

If you have Snow Leopard, or planning to upgrade dont buy this scanner. It was great until I upgraded to Snow Leopard now its just a paper weight. I cant use it until they come out with an update to fix it. Fujitsu says it could be until the end of December before I could use it again. Hopefully its fix before tax time because that was the reason I bought this thing.

Honestly, I would have to say that this is one of the best electronic products I have ever bought. The ScanSnap works exactly like advertised. It is extremely easy to use. Just put your document in the feeder and push the scan button. It scans multi-page documents both front and back quickly and automatically saves them in PDF form. You have the option of saving the document as a text searchable PFD. This is a must have product for anyone wanting to rid themselves of the clutter of paper. Works like a charm on a Mac. It is extremely easy to find documents after scanning with spotlight.

In general, the product works exactly as advertised: it scans all sorts of documents, and combined with DevonThink Pro Office for Macs OCR capabilities, it does everything promised. The paperless office is definitely within reach with this unit, and Ive been incredibly impressed with the speed of the scanning and the accuracy. It doesnt do such a great job with photos or graphics, but I bought the unit primarily to digitize old journal articles, manuscripts and home receipts. SHIPPING/DELIVERY: I appreciated the Amazon Marketplace sellers who could sell me this unit re-furbished without the bundled software packages of Adobe Aqcrobat Pro and Read IRIS, or the Cardiris software. I already own an OCR program and Acrobat, and did not want to shell out for the extra cost, I just wanted the unit itself. TechGalaxy delivered the unit as promised, in great condition, and earlier than expected even using standard shipping. PERFORMANCE & INTEGRATION WITH MAC OS X (Leopard & Snow Leopard): Set up and installation were very easy, just popped in the driver and installed the software drivers with no issues. In general, I did not experience the technical issues reported by other users using Snow Leopard. This may be because of my workflow with DevonThink OCR, I usually just scan to a folder and dont use the quick menu anyway. Scanning documents and changing the settings between sets of what Im scanning has been pretty easy through the scansnap settings menu. It FLEW through scanning a large file cabinet of things in a single afternoon, a project I thought would take an entire weekend! The reason I didnt give it five stars is because of the issue where the unit does not like to scan longer receipts or times when it has paper jams. These are infrequent in general, and usually because of older crumpled receipts, or old articles that havent been fanned enough (it does sometimes scan two pages at once instead of a single sheet at a time). So its not really a set & forget solution, you do need to watch it or check your docs later. If you set up an automator workflow to scan to a folder, then set up the docs for OCR later at night when youre not working on the machine (OCR is super-time and processor intensive if youre doing a large batch all at once - best to save it for a time you dont need to be on at the same time). I have to say it is AWESOME to wake up in the morning to accurate OCRd, searchable documents that once sat in your file cabinet gathering dust. I love that now I can reference old articles for my research with a few keystrokes! Im a graduate student and cannot recommend this unit enough for academic uses. But be warned: refurbished units do NOT come with the Adobe Acrobat Professional software OR the the IRIS OCR software.

after seeing the scansnap in action on a website, i must have spent a good months several pouring over the 10+ odd reviews on amazon for all the pros and cons. the possibility of going paperless was almost more than my inner productivity nerd could handle. so is it worth it? * initial impressions: i distinctly remember my impression the first time steve jobs demoed the iphone. o @#*$@#*$. watching the scansnap slurp in a stack of papers and output them instantly in pdf form produced a similar reaction. so FREAKING FAST. * as other readers have expressed, the ocr is slow. if you dont need to ocr everything you scan, youll be good. at this point, ive just decided that some things dont need ocr. * i heavily debated waiting for the upcoming s300m but ultimately decided to go in for the s510m. the dealbreaker was that the s300m does NOT come with adobe acrobat professional. in my opinion, this TOTALLY makes it the s510m worth it. the ability to optimize / compress / combine / split / adjust your pdfs is very very nice. * make sure to visit the fujitsu site for a $[...] manufacturers rebate. see the discussions on the amazon product page for the s510m more information. * this does photos, but my photo friend told me that the good quality 600dpi is going to give you fuzzy photos. i would imagine if youre not big on exact replication of your photos, youll be fine. in my experience with images + text, no problems. * document clarity is excellent as others have indicated. you can set it up to scan one side (simplex) by default, two sides (duplex), or auto-detect. and yes, it is stupid fast. * my only gripe is that there isnt a save as option right after you scan a document. you have to manually rename in finder. * you know things are different when you start conniving things that might need to be scanned so you can shred / throw them away. bye bye stacks of paper. the speed and ease of scanning is a game changer. there you have it. good stuff!

Have now had this for almost 3 years. Fantastic product! Easy to use. Great form factor (folds up when not in use, does not take up a lot of space). Occasionally the page feeder will feed more than one page at a time and have to start a scan again but that is a rare occurrence. Lots of settings that enable great flexibility re: how an item is scanned / what done with it after the scan completed. Would highly recommend. 2015-09-14 : scanner still going strong. use it all the time. More than 90,000 pages scanned and still going strong... Mostly paper scans but have also scanned thousands of photo prints I took in pre-digital camera days...Dont know what i would do without this little machine.... It has let me go about as digital as possible.

I bought this scanner last month after reading many positive reviews on it by others. I use it to scan all of my clinical records into electronic format for long term storage. That is a very big job. so far, this scanner has certainly lived up to its positive reputation. it is very fast scanning and sending scanned files to the appropriate place is a breeze. It works very well now and I hope that it will continue to work so superbly in the years to come. It was rather pricey (>$400) but once again, it appears that you get what you pay for. I would buy one again in a heart beat.