ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner

I bought this scanner from Amazon just before Christmas after reading many reviews. I must say it was hard to spend $495 on a scanner when you can buy a cheap one for $79. But wow, am I glad I spent the cash. This scanner rocks, especially with the bundled OCR software. Abbyy FineReader is a little slow, even on my dual-core 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro, but by that I mean it takes about 10 seconds per page to produce a fully-searchable PDF. The scanner itself rips through a page in less than two seconds (both sides!), so FineReader becomes the bottleneck if you you want to OCR a large number of documents. But its not like you have to stand there and supervise. Just dump a stack of papers in the feeder, press the button and walk away. If you value your time, buy this scanner. Some people have asked how well it scans photos. Great! The ScanSnap software includes the option to scan directly into iPhoto. Ive already scanned hundreds of old snapshots that have been sitting in boxes for ages because it was too much hassle to scan them one-at-a-time on my old flatbed scanner. Finally, I just want to mention something I havent seen in other reviews. The scanner is also bundled with CardIris business card scanning software. This software does an OK job of scanning and OCRing business cards, which you can then import into Address Book or pretty much any other contact manager or database/spreadsheet app. Unfortunately its a PowerPC app, but it runs fine on my Intel Mac. The OCR function is not as accurate as FineReader, but it allows you to edit each card before saving.

Tremendous scanner. Software setup went quickly (10 minutes). Fed several scans in - they literally take 2 seconds. Both sides scanned at once. OCR took maybe 30 seconds. Set up different profiles (single sided, both sides at once, OCR) and feed away. Highly recommend. This little machine is going to eat all my papers, and (for me) Im going to OCR them all and have everything saved and text searchable on my Mac. They seriously should set these things up at Apple stores - their sales (I mean Apples, as well as Fujitsus) would fly off the shelves.

I have used the product for little over a month now with Apple Mac OS X Leopard. The first impulse I felt after seeing this ScanSnap in action was to get all my documents out of the drawer, scan them all and dispose off the space robbing file folders/boxes or whatchamacallit! Its one of the best investments I have made. It works flawlessly. It gives new meaning to the word ease of use! The inclusion of Adobe Acrobat 8 (not yet fully/officially supported on Leopard but so far works fine) itself is worth the price. Fujitsu seems to have understood very well the concept of elegance in simplicity so much espoused by Apple in its products and philosophy. This is one of those products where you cant think of anything to add to make it better!

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.

I can only repeat what others have said: I love this thing. I looked at several other sheet-fed scanners from HP and others. Nothing seems to do what this does. It is very simple, very well designed, a very fast. My advice is to download the updated software on the support site - scanning profiles is a nice feature. Im a grad student who is overloaded with research and documents - this made it very simple to create pdfs and use spotlight to search for them when I need them.

Been using the S510M for a couple of weeks now and the best thing about this scanner (IMHO) is its speed vs scan quality. This little machine will scan sheets quickly and still produce very good images for archiving and even re-printing. Higher resolution scans will slow it down a bit but thats to be expected. The software that Fujitsu has developed for the scanner (the ScanSnap Manager) is relatively intuitive and highly customizable. The third party software is decent but I need to find pdf generation/editing software that doesnt require so much in the way of system resources (speaking of Adobe Professional of course). Cardiris works okay and ABBYY is decent as well. Caution to those expecting a full blown version of ABBYY, the version thats packaged with the S510M appears to only work on documents that are scanned through the S510M then dumped into ABBYY. I tried opening ABBYY and OCRing a pdf file and it wouldnt work. Overall Im very happy with the purchase. A bit pricey but you get a pretty good little workhorse scanner that doesnt take up a whole lot of space.

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!

I bought this scanner after looking for an affordable solution to clearing up the paper that had accumulated in our house. This scanner has been fabulous and is really attractively priced (especially when there are rebates) for a unit used at home. I have been able to clear up multiple drawers from several file cabinets that included: taxes, receipts, recipes, magazine articles, bills, etc. I now am confident that I can actually located something when I need it for taxes or warranty work. The scans are clear and the text recognition is very good. In addition I find the software to be very flexible and works with my workflow. I have two different scenarios for use: 1) Daily As I get my mail and open it or pay a bill, I mark it paid and immediately scan it and then shred it (this is where I cant already get an electronic bill). 2) Bulk scanning Here I will typically sort paper into sets, this is where the software flexibility comes in. I take everything that needs double-sided scanning and is the same number of pages and I set the software to create a new document every n-pages. Then I can stick a stack of pages in that arent related and let it do its job. If I have a stack of single sided items I make sure to mark it like that in the software and everything goes smoothly. Originally I bought this when I was using OS X 10.4 (Tiger), upgraded to 10.5 (Leopard) with no problem. I had to wait till a new driver and software was released before upgrading to 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It works just as smoothly as before with the new drivers. This has really reduced the amount of paperwork that stacks up in the house and with Spotlight on the Mac, I can find these documents way better than I could in my filing cabinet. I highly recommend this product to those looking to reduce paper!

This is the fastest scanner I have ever used. Being able to drop a stack of papers in, and not worry about it they are double-sided or not (it automatically detects and scans both sides!) is just great. The software is fine, too. Before, I used to dread scanning because it would take forever, but this scanner is faster than my fast printer. And it is tiny and looks nice. And it works perfectly with Macs, including with the latest Leopard 10.5 OS, which is more than I can say about most scanners. I cant imagine how anyone would be disappointed by it.

Initially the scanner came with wrong adapter wire. I contacted the seller who replaced it promptly. Prior to my buying this scanner I made some queries with the seller who was very helpful in providing information and assured me that in case I was not happy with the product I could return the same for a full refund. That was great. I have used the scanner for just two days so I cant really say much except that so far it is running very well. For an old and used scanner it is doing a decent job. Specially since I am still in the learning mode. Overall I am very happy with the purchase.