Fujitsu ScanSnap Mac works great!
Yesterday I finally installed the driver software for the Fujitsu ScanSnap for Macintosh. familiarized myself with the Acrobat 7 software (how to delete unnecessary pages, crop pages, reorder pages...) and within a few minutes I was scanning away. All in all I scanned more than 350 pages, and as most of them were double sided, more than 700 pages of paper were eliminated. I left all of them as PDFs in a folder on my hard drive and just gave them meaningful names, so I (or at least SpotLight!) can find them again. I also tried the "Recognize Text Using OCR..." function in Acrobat 7 and it easily converted the supplied PDF into a searchable PDF. The only small caveat, I found until now: sometimes when I power the ScanSnap up by opening the silver lid, the driver software does not automatically recognize the scanner and needs a few retries to finally work again, but besides that the SnanSnap for Mac is the best investment for my Mac in the last few years, even surpassing the excellent ElGato EyeTV 200 and 300 TV tuners in usefulness.
posted by TeddyTheBear at 6:10 AM
11 Comments:
I understand the Scansnap is quite fast and convenient to use, but wouldn't most people be happy with, say, a Canon MP 780 that has a scan feeder and will also more or less automatically create PDF (including multipage files) from the stuff you feed into it... plus it prints (on CD as well) and works as a fax and costs 200 EUR less.
The great thing on the ScanSnap, that sets it apart from most other scanners: duplex scanning at 15ppm. That means you feed it 15 double sided pages, and within a minute you have a 30 page PDF! I have been using scanners on the Mac for nearly 20 years now, but if the scanning speed is too slow, you just don´t use it that much. The 15ppm scan engine, plus the USB2 interface and a current Mac with a G4 CPU with more than a GHz and 1 GB of RAM makes this devices so useful to me. BTW: it is so small, that uses next to no space on my very little desk.
Will the ScanSnap do odd sized pages? I want one of these for digitizing my textbooks.
Yes, everything down to business card size.
Does the Mac version come with the same software that the Windows version comes with? I know the Windows version has software that helps you organize your PDF's, but I can't seem to find if the Mac version also has that.
Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0 Mac, which is included with the Fujitsu SnapScan Mac, lets you organize PDFs AND it includes"Recognize TExt Using OCR..." with support for a variety of European languages
About Macintels I just got it last week and it works perfectly on a 24" aluminum imac. The only drawback acrobat 7 standard is a powerPC application. Works fine, but for things like OCR its a bit slow. You dont need to use acrobat for this scanner. The scaner app (ScanSnap Manager) is a Universal app and it creates PDFs on its own you can then edit those pdfs on any app that supports it. Acrobat 7 standard is great even on an intel mac for most things you may need (exept the speed of the OCR). I converted 22 textbooks to PDF. Each time the scanner starts and stops creates a new PDF so acrobat worked great in putting all those PDFs together on a single file for each textbook. Rather than using autocolor detection I forced it to scan color always (cause my books have many grayscale images) and it wasn't any slower I used better scanning detail so I was going at 12 ppm double sided. 24 pages per minute pdf. I went to FedEx Kinkos and had them cut the binding off my books so I could feed them through the scanner. I think it was like 2 dolars per cut or something like that.
I use my ScanSnap on my MBP (macintel) without problems. It simply works great.
AND by the end of next month, the new version (S510M) is coming out, and afaik it will be bundled with Acrobat 8.
I've used it with success, however after scanning approximately 2000 pages the scansnap manager is incredibly slow at deleting the pdfs after I move them to another document. Any ideas?
Unfortunately: no.
I've used the ScanSnap quite a bit, and I have the exact same problem as "Anonymous 11:33 AM". The software takes over 5 minutes to delete, rename, or move a file to a different folder. I barely started looking for a fix, but still, I advise caution.
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