Fujitsu ScanSnap S300

You could reasonably argue over whether the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 ($295 direct) is the world's biggest portable scanner or its smallest desktop document scanner. Fujitsu fudges the issue by calling it the world's smallest portable scanner that both duplexes (scans both sides of a page at once) and includes an automatic document feeder (ADF). Whatever your take on that, it's an impressive piece of hardware bundled with less-than-ideal—if still useful—software. The result is a package that manages to be highly attractive, even though it may leave you (and certainly left me) wishing for more.

When I think of a portable scanner, I usually think of something petite, such as the Editors' Choice Plustek OpticSlim M12 Corporate, which is smaller than a short stack of 12-inch rulers and weighs only 0.7 pounds. The S300 is substantially larger, at 3 by 11.2 by 3.8 inches (HWD), and relatively heavy at 3.1 pounds.

What you get for the Fujitsu's extra size and weight is both duplex scanning, which is rare in a portable scanner, and a 10-page ADF, which is rarer still if not currently unique. You also get much faster scans than with most portable scanners. Even without taking the relatively fast scan speed into account, simply using an ADF boosts overall speed compared with feeding paper manually.

I tested the S300 under Windows XP, but Fujitsu says the software also works with Windows 2000, Vista, and Vista x64. In addition, there's a version for the Mac (also $295 direct), but you can't buy a single scanner with both Mac and Windows software. Setup is reasonably typical for a portable scanner. Install the software, and plug in the cables. It departs from the norm, however, in how it gets power.

A portable scanner should be easy to connect, since you have to reconnect it every time you take it somewhere and set it up again. The ideal is to use a single USB cable for both data and power, so all you need do is boot up your computer and connect one cable to be ready to scan. According to Fujitsu, however, the S300 needs more power than it can get over a single USB cable. So although it uses power from the data cable, it has two different ways to get the additional power it requires.

The preferred choice, because it will give you the fastest scans, is to connect to a wall socket. If there isn't one available, you can get the additional power from a second USB port by connecting a special cable that plugs into the S300's power connector. One drawback to using the USB cable instead of plugging into a wall socket is that it makes scans take twice as long. Another is that some notebooks are stingy about ports. Although these days there are myriad laptops with multiple USB ports, some have only two; if yours is one of those, you won't be able to connect anything else at the same time unless you also carry a USB hub with you.

More troublesome than the power connection issue is the fact that the S300 comes with very little software, just a scan utility and two programs. CardMinder is a reasonably capable business card program. ScanSnap Organizer is a document management program with some interesting features, including the ability to connect to Microsoft SharePoint. As a desktop document manager, however, it's simply not in the same league as a top-tier program like Nuance PaperPort.

Not included in the bundled software—and sorely missed—is a Twain driver to let you scan from programs with a scan command. Instead, you have to define scan profiles to specify programs to scan to. When you scan, you first pick a profile, optionally make changes to the scan settings, and then press the scanner's one button.

This approach works well enough, but it means you can't scan directly to a program without going though the work of creating a profile. You're also limited to defining a maximum of 11 profiles. If you define more than one per program—with both duplex and simplex versions in both color and black and white, for example—the number of programs you can scan to can be severely limited. A Twain driver gives you much more flexibility. Anyone who's used to scanning from within programs will probably miss having a Twain driver to call on.

If you don't mind the S300's approach to scanning, you should be more than happy with the results. In default mode it's rated at 8 pages per minute (ppm), or 16 images per minute (ipm) for duplex pages. On my tests using power from a wall socket and scanning 10 pages to a PDF image file, it was a touch faster for simplex scanning, at 8.1 ppm, and a touch slower than rated speed for duplex scanning, at 15.6 ipm. These speeds would be slow for a desktop document scanner, but they're blazingly fast compared with other portables. The S300 is faster than other portables even when getting all its power over a USB connection, if only because you don't have to feed pages manually.

Scanning, recognizing the text, and saving the result as a searchable PDF file is also reasonably fast. On my tests, the recognition step added about 1 minute 15 seconds in duplex mode (for 10 double-sided pages) for a total time of 3:08.

Thanks to CardMinder, the S300 does an excellent job as a business card scanner, too. It can run business cards through its ADF at fast speed, recognize the text reasonably well, and send the results to a variety of programs, including Outlook and Goldmine.

I'd strongly argue that the S300 would be a lot more useful if it came with a Twain driver and if Fujitsu added more, and better, software to the package—a top-tier document management program like PaperPort and a desktop indexer like X1 come to mind. That said, this product is still well worth considering, and it certainly delivers the fastest scans I've yet seen in a portable scanner.

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