Fujitsu SnanSnap S510 Scanner Review

A few months ago, I installed a pair of Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 scanners for a customer. They needed high-speed document scanners in order to convert a HUGE amount of paper records, to digitize new records, and to provide digital submissions to their supporting agencies.

After installing these scanners, I played around with them for a little bit. I was blown away. Yes, these scanners are expensive, but they still astounded me with their speed. You can drop 50 pages on the scanner, hit the "go" button, and have them scanned in - double sided - in less than three minutes.

Now, that is at the lowest settings (which are still quite good), so I decided to try higher quality settings, and found that the speed was not reduced nearly as much as I had expected. The diminutive size shouldn't fool you - these are fast units.

They also come with Acrobat and some OCR software. This is where it gets cool... the scanned images can be automtically run through the OCR software, then have a searchable PDF created. This is the option that the agency chose to use, and it works very well. The OCR and PDF creation take longer than the scanning - a fast CPU is recommended.

Now, after a customer fills out and signs forms at the agency, they drop it on the scanner, hit the "go" button, and it is scanned, OCRd, a PDF created, and that is automatically submitted to their providers. Fast and easy.

Overall, I found only one downside to this scanner: There are no TWAIN drivers for it. Not supplying TWAIN drivers is downright silly. In fact, it could have been a deal-breaker, except that a work-around was found to still allow the auto-submit to their providers.

After installing these two scanners, I installed a Xerox unit for them for the benefit of TWAIN drivers - but when it was time for a fourth scanner, they specifically asked for the Fujitsu again. If you can live without TWAIN drivers, this is a very good scanner.

Update: The S510 appears to be superseded by a new model, the S510M.

Second Update: Now appears superceded by the S1500. Note that the Acrobat software with this model no longer supports Windows 2000.