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Fujitsu Document scanner

Domoticaworld.com Posted on by

Last week I received my Document scanner. In an attempt to make my home paperless this is the first step. I’m currently working on a Project Page, trying to capture some of the lessons-learned. This post is more about the scanner itself and the choices I had to make.

Note with paperless, in some cases I mean: “turning every piece of paper into a digital format”. Ideally with paperless you want to make sure that paper is never send to your house ;-). That’s the next step.

What scanner did I buy? The Fujitsu S1500. (approx e 400).

s1500_closeds1500_open2

 

 

 

 

Don’t buy it because…

  • It does not support TWAIN or ISIS .
    I don’t care about this. The scanner software allows you to automatically generate searchable PDF’s with a pretty good OCR engine. The PDF’s are written to a NAS where they are picked up by the document management software.
  • You cannot scan to TIFF image files
    I don’t care about this for the reason mentioned above
  • Depending on the amount of paperwork that you want to scan, you could pick the S1300 (e 250 vs. e 400) instead of the S1500.
    I picked the S1500 because of the huge amount of paperwork from the past years that I want to process. For the amount of weekly incoming paperwork the S1300 (and probably the S1100 around e185, has no document feeder!) would be sufficient.

BUY it because…

  • It has a good price for a professional scanner
  • I don’t care about USB. Using a Belkin USB LAN hub I can put it on the network
  • Paperless = Everything stored as searchable PDF. The S1500 does that in a single click.

Strange. Looking at the 2 paragraphs above it might seem that there’s very little reasons to BUY the scanner ;-). I did and so far I have no regrets. It’s fast, quiet, low power consumption.

NOTE: there are 2 versions of this scanner. The S1500 (e 390) and S1500M (e 490). In case you’re wondering that the difference is: NOTHING. The ‘M’ version has the MAC drivers and Scansnap Manager. Fujitsu: What the hell were you (not) thinking?? Idiots.
For the people that moved from Windows to a Mac and don’t want to buy a new scanner: check this post on how to install the Mac software ;-)

 

Power usage

Off: 0W
Idle: 4W
Operational: 16-20W

Use it anywhere

To use it anywhere in the house I have connected the S1500 USB scanner to a Belkin Lan USB Hub (F5L049, price: around e 60). OS support: both Windows and OSX.

belkin_lanusbbelkin_lanusb2

 

 

 

 

This is basically an USB extension chord over WLAN. On the PC that needs a connection to the scanner you run the Belkin Connect application. This allows the PC to see the WLAN connected scanner as a local USB device.

Comments

Fujitsu Document scanner — 5 Comments

  2. Yes, that should be possible. Haven’t tested this in a real multi-user environment, but everybody who has the belkin SW can get access to the scanner. Users can request ‘control’ access when the scanner is connected to another computer. Note, you can’t have multiple users accessing the scanner at once.

  3. So, this scanner can scan directly to a NAS (NETGEAR)? Or do I have to use a PC to do this?

    • Danny,
      This scanner is connected to the Fujitsu ScanSnap software that runs on either OSX or Windows. I have configured the ScanSnap software to store all documents on my NAS. So yes, you need something between the Scanner and the NAS.

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