ScanSnap In Your Home Paperwork-flow

If you're one of the growing ranks who prefer to vault their bills, statements, and other important documents on disk rather than in a filing cabinet, you might want to take a close look at the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 and S300M (the former is for PC, and the latter for the Mac platform).

This tiny-footprint little gem lets you gang up your week's worth of "can't just chuck it" paperwork, scan it, and save it as a PDF in a single pass. Shred the paper and feed it to your worm-farm (they love paper!), retaining the content in digital form. With terabyte-drive prices dropping daily, storage is no longer a serious constraint, so scan as many documents as you want! Just get your filing scheme together ahead of time so you can find your stuff quickly when you want it.

The ScanSnap software for the Mac isn't so slick as Apple aficianodos will want, but it works well and reliably. Simply gather a sheaf of your bills and statements and place them in the fold-out feeder. The scanner captures both sides at the same time (called duplexing) and even corrects the skew on items like small receipts or the odd newspaper clipping that can easily get tilted as they are grabbed by the sheet-feeding mechanism.

This mechanism deserves an honorable mention: it's truly amazing on this little guy. Many of the heinous, clock and heart-stopping problems you've experienced on fax machines and printers simply don't crop up. I'm not sure how they do it, but the combination of automatic image-correcting software and the clever mechanism banish 95% of those little paper jams and gotchas that take so much time to recover from.

Once your scanning is completed, the ScanSnap software saves the output as a PDF that you can either save as-is, or perform optical character recognition to transform it into machine-readable and searchable characters and words. On drawback to note: the scanner is not TWAIN compliant, so you have to use the Fujitsu software. Photoshop or any other application looking for TWAIN won't see this guy.

The ScanSnap is powered by an AC adapter (included) or with a USB cable. This means the scanner is truly portable. You can literally carry it in your suitcase and set it up on your Powerbook or PC using your USB ports. One caveat here is that you need two USB ports (or a powered hub with two ports free): one for data and another for power. If you've got a wall socket available, you only need one USB port, but you have to drag your power supply with you, too.