Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner

I was very impressed at how well this scanner can handle handwritten notes. They are on lined paper, which is not as clear as white copy paper. It's not a problem for the ScanSnap S510. I set it to Black and White and "Better" quality, and was able to scan 70 pages of notes in a matter of minutes. They came out crisp and legible, and when I was done, the PDF was only 3.6MB!

Jams do happen from time to time, because the rollers run the paper through so quickly. But it's easy to fix. Also, the scanner comes with a carrier sheet, for scanning newspapers and large documents, or preventing "multi-feeds" (when the feeder doesn't feed a single sheet like it's supposed to).

It's possible that a more expensive model would have a better feeder that wouldn't jam. Documents that were folded can be hard to feed. However, the scans are so quick and so impressive that it's forgivable.

Be advised that there are no TWAIN drivers for this scanner. You have to use ScanSnap Manager. The software is intelligent enough to rotate images automatically, and detect skew automatically and correct it. This is very nice to have. There appears to be some integration between the software and the hardware. For example, when you push the green SCAN button on the scanner, the software can detect whether there is a document in the scanner. If there is no paper, it will alert you.

I haven't tried the OCR so I can't comment on it. Instead, I use Adobe Acrobat to do OCR. In general, you shouldn't need an excessively high resolution to do it like some reviewers mentioned; 300 DPI is sufficient. Higher resolutions will simply require more processing time.

I highly recommend the ScanSnap S510. If you have a lot of paper documents, the ScanSnap S510 can help you.

Works great, a bit pricy however.
If you need to do a lot of scanning the price is worth it.
Comes w/a good software package as well.

The Fujitsu S510 is absolutely the fastest scanner I've ever seen. I love the fact that it converts on-the-fly to PDF and that it has a very small footprint. The only negative is that it occasionally takes in two sheets at a time. Overall I'm very pleased with the product.

I rarely bother to do this, but this little scanner is the best thing I've bought for my business in the last three or four years. It's allowing me to finally go nearly paperless. You get what you pay for, and this is true value for the money.

I went from an HP scanner with document feeder - a device that took a huge footprint and gave less than perfect results, to this compact, quick, high quality output device with a footprint of about 5" x 11" and couldn't be any happier. I highly recommend this equipment.