The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100 ($229) is a manual-feed portable document scanner designed for capturing data to your laptop, smartphone, or tablet on the road. The iX100 is an update to a 2014 Editors' Choice product by the same name that, at the time, was one of the most impressive portable document scanners we'd ever seen. While the ScanSnap iX100's hardware is primarily the same, its software bundle is entirely different, and is perhaps one of the most comprehensive collections of portable document scanner utilities we've ever seen. As a single-sheet manual-feed device, though, it's designed for small one- and two-page scan jobs. Within those confines, the iX100 is an exceptional-value portable scanner.
Moderate Hardware for Modest Jobs
Portable document scanners come in two distinct flavors. There's single-sheet devices like the iX100 that accept one page at a time and therefore require you to insert each page manually. And then there's multi-page sheet-feed portables, such as the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce ES-300W, with automatic document feeders (ADFs) capable of accepting several pages (usually up to 20), allowing you to attend to other tasks as your portable scanner feeds itself. Portable scanners with ADFs, then, are much more suitable for scanning multipage jobs.
Also, nowadays, most portable scanners, including the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce ES-60W, come with two imaging sensors, allowing the scanner to capture both sides of two-sided (duplex) pages simultaneously, a feature that the iX100 lacks. Keeping in mind, however, that the iX100 is designed primarily for small scan jobs, I suspect that for most users the lack of support for duplex scanning is a minor inconvenience—especially given the productivity and convenience afforded by this little scanner's software, which I'll discuss in detail below.
Similar Products
At 1.4 by 10.7 by 1.9 inches (HWD) and weighing 14 ounces, the iX100 is slightly bigger than the ES-60W ($151.19 at Amazon) and several other Epson manual-feed portables, and somewhat smaller and lighter than the Xerox Duplex Travel Scanner, another PCMag favorite. The bottom line is that all these devices are quite compact and not much to carry around with you.
All the models mentioned here so far, including the iX100, come with internal batteries that allow you to operate them without plugging into a power source. Fujitsu claims that the iX100's battery is good for 260 scans, which should be plenty for a couple days on the road. In addition to charging and passing data via USB, the iX100 also supports Wi-Fi, as do the Epson portables mentioned above, but the Xerox model does not. With the battery and wireless connectivity, you can operate the iX100 without it being physically connected to anything.
The ScanSnap iX100 hardware is, like the other devices mentioned here, a simple device. On the left end, you'll find a mini USB port for, as mentioned, connecting to your PC or mobile device and/or charging.
On the right end is a simple control panel comprising a Start button and two LCD status indicators for Wireless and Battery. Otherwise, all aspects of your scan jobs, including resolution, file type, destination, and everything else are handled via the ScanSnap software.
Comprehensive Software Bundle
While most portable scanners these days come with the software required to scan to image and searchable PDF formats, as well as perform rudimentary document management, few come with a bundle of utilities that cover such an extensive array of tasks as the one included here. The ScanSnap iX100 utility bundle includes CardMinder, ScanSnap Cloud, ScanSnap Organizer, and ScanSnap Receipt, as well as software that lets you scan two small documents, such as, say, two receipts, side by side, and a utility for scanning and stitching oversize pages back together.
Most of those utility names speak for themselves, though perhaps ScanSnap Organizer doesn't readily suggest document management. In any case, it all starts with ScanSnap Home, shown below, which acts as a sort of gateway between the scanner and the other ScanSnap apps.
ScanSnap Home configures itself to work with various kinds of documents, such as receipts, as shown above.
ScanSnap Receipt is, again, a somewhat robust app for extracting and organizing financial data, but compared with Epson's ScanSmart Accounting Edition that comes with several of that company's scanners, including the WorkForce ES-65WR, its export features are not quite as robust. Where ScanSnap Receipt lets you export to CSV, PDF, and JPEG, ScanSmart Accounting Edition exports to QuickBooks (desktop and online versions), Quicken, Excel (CSV), and TurboTax.
If you need more powerful accounting support, Fujitsu also offers the ScanSnap iX100 Mobile Scanner Powered with Neat ($299.99), which comes with a one-year Neat Premium license. Neat, if you're not familiar with it, is a capable financial data extracting, manipulating, and archiving program that integrates with several accounting and tax preparation solutions.
Document management includes the ability to save to JPEG, Microsoft Word, Excel, and image and searchable PDFs, and ScanSnap Cloud supports the following cloud sites: Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Google Docs, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Shoeboxed.
As Fast as You Can Feed It
Fujitsu says that the iX100 scans a full-size page in 5.2 seconds, or about 11 pages per minute (ppm). As with any manual-feed scanner, much depends on how quickly you feed it, and, of course, the speed of the software the hardware hands the scan off to. As I sat there diligently feeding it page after page, I managed, when scanning to image PDF, to coerce about 9.9ppm out of it, which is about 1.7ppm slower than the Epson ES-60W and around twice as fast as the Xerox Duplex Travel Scanner ($125.39 at Amazon) .
As to Fujitsu's 5.2 seconds per page claim, if I discount the time required to process and save the document, what we call the "lag" time, well, then, absolutely, it easily pulled each page through the mechanism at a rate of about 5 seconds. The iX100, compared with its competition is plenty fast enough.
Impressive Accuracy
Optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy, or how well scanned text is converted to editable text, has made great strides over the past few years—so much so that many scan jobs don't require any manual error correction. In our 2014 round of accuracy testing on the iX100, it (and the bundled software of that time) scanned, converted, and saved our Arial font test page down to 6 points without any mistakes, and our Times New Roman font test page down to 8 points error-free.
Four and a half years ago, these were considered highly impressive results. Nowadays, though, most scanners, even portables, are managing 5 and 6 points without mistakes for each font, which, considering that for most typefaces, 4 points and below aren't often legible without magnification, is about as good as it gets.
This time around, the iX100 scanned and converted both fonts down to 6 points. That score tied nearly all the Epson portables we've reviewed recently, except the Editors' Choice Epson ES-60W, as well as the Xerox Duplex Travel Scanner, which both managed 5 points accurate for Arial and 6 points for Times New Roman.
I also scanned into CardMinder and ScanSnap Receipt, just to see how accurately they extrapolated and identified the data and populated the database fields within those two programs. My experience here was similar to other programs designed to handle these types of data, especially business cards. Plain white cards containing standard serif and sans-serif fonts worked best, with accuracy degrading as the card designs and typefaces got fancier.
Receipt and other financial document scanning were mostly precise, too, as long as the printouts were relatively clear. I did, however, have some issues with show-through interference on thin, two-sided thermal receipt paper. Sometimes it was easier to simply type the pertinent data into ScanSnap Receipt and/or CardMinder.
One Feature Away
The ScanSnap iX100 is an excellent scanner with exceptional software that covers most areas—document management, cloud scanning, financial data, and business card archiving—that your small or home-based office might require. It's fast and accurate and has a more-than-adequate battery life. All it really lacks is a second sensor for single-pass two-sided scanning, but as we said earlier, for most users, this is probably a minor inconvenience.
If you require auto-duplexing, though, Epson makes several portables with two sensors, including the ES-60W and the ES-65WR ($428.00 at Amazon) . If your future entails scanning multipage jobs, the Editors' Choice ES-300W or its Accounting Edition counterpart, the ES-300WR , should serve you well. But its attractive price and robust software suite make the ScanSnap iX100 a sensible alternative for moderate scanning while on the road or in your small office.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100 is a fast and feature-packed manual-feed document scanner designed for light-duty data capture on the road.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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