Great for Organizing Your Office and Scanning Photos

MY EXPERIENCE
The digital age has ushered in the ability to easily store digital images of our pictures to a PC, CD or DVD. But what do you do with the years of pictures before the digital camera? For me, I started looking at options to scan in the thousands of old photos that we had stashed away in our closet.

There are many services that will scan your pictures, but most require you to ship off your photos. And with prices at 20-30 cents per image, it would cost $400-600 to scan all my prints. I paid less than this for the scanner, plus I continue to get benefits from continuing to own the scanner outright (more about that in a minute).

I looked at various options for scanning the old photos, but found there were literally no photo scanners that met my needs - automated document feed, fast and easy to use. Most of the scanners I found were flatbed, with thousands of pictures it was take way too much time.  I found a couple of scanners with auto document feeders, but based on other reviews the scan was too slow and results were subpar.

I happen to stumble on the Fujitsu S510 through an email from an online merchant with special pricing.  It had all the features I was looking for. While not specifically designed or advertised for scanning photos, based on my experience it has performed quite nicely.  Over the course of one weekend, I was able to scan over 2,000 photos - and this was done very leisurely, load up 50 photos into the document scanner and go about my business for the day, just load up the document feeder throughout the day. Set to the highest resolution the scanner would process 8-10 photos a minute.  I could have scanned all pictures in about half a day if I sat dedicated at my PC. To me eye, the quality of the photo scans are quite good, the true professional photographer might be more particular and find some fault with the results. But honestly to me, the results are all that I was looking for and then some.

I had originally purchased the S510 just to scan my old photos.  My thought was that once I was done I'd just resell the scanner as used to recoup my out of pocket costs. However since using the S510 I have found this to be much more useful to me. Using the features this unit was designed for I now use this to scan in all my bills, bank statements, financial and tax records (the past 10 years worth).  I've literally cleared out drawers of paper and digitized to my hard drive (I then create a back-up to a DVD for safe storage, something I didn't have with the paper documents).  I've now decided to keep the scanner and use it regularly. I can see how this is a great scanner for an office environment!

In the thousands of photos I've scanned I had 6 or so jams. Given I was shoving 40-50 photos into the document scanner at a time that's not too bad in my opinion. While scanning my other documents I've encountered a few additional jams, this seems to be mostly when I unstaple papers and don't separate them thoroughly enough. I've seen one person suggest for any documents that are stapled you cut off the corner with the staple.  I should point out that clearing a jam is quite easily, press one button and the front of the scanner flips forward, remove documents and close - it's that easy.

The include ScanSnap software offers many options and configuration settings. You can also create different profiles that you can easily change to. I have a profile for Photos (set for high resolution JPG), Financials (set to high resolution PDF) and Standard (Good resolution PDF). You can then set any of the profiles as the default when pressing the green scan button, and changing this default is as simple as a clicking the "SnapScan" icon in the tool tray.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE S510
-  Automated document feeder
-  Fast scanning of pages. When set to "good" quality this scanner will process about 15 pages per minute
-  Automatic scanning of both front and back of document in single pass, does not take any additional time to do duplex scanning
- Saves documents as a PDF or JPG formats, these are about as universal file formats as one could ask for
-  Small footprint, takes up very little space
- Auto page sensing, you can load various paper sizes and the S510 will automatically detect the paper size and format accordingly
- Ability to create searchable PDF files, through OCR software included the PDF file is created so that you can easily search for text within a document. This processing takes place immediately after scanning documents and it can take quite some time to complete so this is something be done selectively
- Adobe 8 software is included (that's a $200 software package itself)

WHAT I DON'T LIKE ABOUT THE S510
There isn't much, but let me highlight what some might consider negatives about this scanner
- Not "twain" compatible, requires that you use the ScanSnap software included. You therefore can't acquire images from this scanner directly to another program, such as Adobe Photoshop. This was not deal breaker for me since the S510 saves in either universal PDF or JPG formats. However if you need to integrate with other scanning software you might find this somewhat limiting.
- Limited output formats, only PDF and JPG supported
- ScanSnap software user interface - many options are buried in the various configuration settings. As an example, the settings default to a "Quick Menu" function (limits the number of configuration options). With this setting I was unable to change the output format from PDF to JPG. I first had to turn off Quick Menus and then set to "Color" scan option before I could change output to JPG. 


FEATURES OF S510
- The Fujitsu S510 is a easy to use, one-button scanner. Simply load your documents into the document feeder (up to 50 pages) and press the big green button. Your documents are automatically scanned (black and white or color). The S510 will automatically detect if the both sides of the document needs to be scanned and scans both in a single pass.
-  Auto Paper Size Detection - Scan in mixed sizes of documents, from business card size to legal.
-  Auto de-skew - Automatically straightens pages and text
-  Auto Blank Page Detection - Automatically recognizes and delete blank pages
- Searchable PDF Files - Automatically converts a scanned image to a searchable PDF file with included OCR software. This will increase time to complete scanning, this is optional.
- Scan Directly to Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint with included ABBYY software.
- CardMinder Software - automatically captures information from scanned business cards.

SPECIFICATIONS
- Scan Modes Supported (PPM is based on  A4 paper size):
Normal - 36 PPM, 150 DPI Color, 300 DPI B/W
Better - 24 PPM, 200 DPI Color, 400 DPI B/W
Best - 12 PPM, 300 DPI Color, 600 DPI B/W
Excellent - 1.2 PPM, 600 DPI Color, 1200 DPI B/W
- Paper Sizes Supported: A4, A5, A6, B5, B6, Business card, Letter, Legal and Custom sizes (can be set for up to 5 different paper types) / Automatically recognizes paper type by paper length.
- Document Capacity: Up to 50 pages
- The scanner is also very small with a 12 x 7 (w x d) footprint. 

What's in the Box?
S510 scanner
AC adapter and Cable
USB cable
Set up CD-ROM (driver, manual)
ScanSnap carrier sheet
Getting started guide.
Software Included: AdobeAcrobat 8.0 Standard, ScanSnap Manager v4.1, ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap 3.0), CardMinder v3.1, ScanSnap Organizer v3.1 and Rack2-Filer (Trial version).

Operating System Requirements:  Windows 2000 Pro (SP4) / XP (SP2) / VISTA (32-bit ). The scanner features a speedy USB 2.0 interface.  If you have a Mac, there is a separate version of the S510 (the S510M) designed specifically for the Mac.  In my research on this scanner I've seen that it's possible to use the non-Mac version with a Mac. However please note that you cannot use the Mac version (S510M) with a Windows system PC.  So be sure you get the right model.

System Requirements: Intel Pentium 4 @ 1.8 GHz or higher, 512 MB of memory or higher, 1400 MB of disk storage (to accommodate all bundled software), DVD-ROM drive, and USB 2.0 (recommended) or USB 1.1 interface.

The Bottom Line
This scanner has met and surpassed all my expectations. From scanning photos to financial documents, this does it all quite well and fast.

NOTE: If you have documents of unusual shapes such as newpaper clippings, the S510 includes a Carrier Sheet that you can place in the page into. This is a see through plastic holder that feeds those pages easily into your scanner.