Scansnap S500M Clr Dupl Scanner (Mac Version)

List Price: $815.05

Features:

• Efficient and robust Intel Mac-compatible document scanner
• Easy one-touch PDF creation; comes with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard
• Compact angular design takes up little space
• Scans 18 pages per minute (36 images per minute in duplex)
• 1-year limited manufacturer's warranty

Customer Reviews:

Scansnap S500M [Posted on 2007-10-11]
Back in the PC days, there was a product called a Visioneer scanner. It's come back now, but alas, it still does not work with a Mac. That is why I was interested in this product, even though the price is much higher than the original Visioneer.

The Scansnap turned out to be worth every penny. It is fast and accurate, and the included Adobe Acrobat works extremely well with it. The ability to scan both sides simultaneously really is an advantage.

There is an occasional glitch when it feeds 2 pages at a time, but the software allows easy recovery, either during or after the scan. This product is highly recommended!

Works as advertised [Posted on 2007-10-14]
I've had the ScanSnap 500m for a few months now. It works as advertised. Scans both sides of my documents quickly, even on "best" quality. It's easy to use to, just insert the paper and push a button and it goes into a PDF that I can edit later. I took a star off because it doesn't support TWAIN so you are stuck with the basic scanning software that comes with it, but once it is in a PDF file most any OCR software will read it and use it. I've found that ABYY Finereader is the best at OCRring, wish they made a Mac version. Anyways, the scanner's great.

scanning for idiots [Posted on 2007-10-23]
Very easy to set up, and very easy to use. It is very fast. It exceeded my expectations.

Beware if you plan to OCR [Posted on 2007-10-29]
I just purchased the newer version of this scanner, the S5210M. I did so reluctantly because I have switched to a Mac and my wonderful Canon DR-5380c scanner isn't supported. It won't even work with Windows running under Fusion.

The S510M is very nice mechanically. It's small (though not particularly attractive) and its scanning operation is smooth, quiet, fast and accurate. The problem is that the OCR is done as a separate pass in software, using the ABBYY Finescan software included. The OCR process takes approximately six times as long as scanning the document! A 28 page document scans in about 45 seconds, but takes five additional minutes to OCR. And if you're not careful with the settings, the resulting OCR file will be several times the size of the original (The documentation is very vague about the settings, so you have to set them by trial and error). I just scanned a 100 page document in under 4 minutes, but it required an additional 20 minutes to run through the OCR engine. The Canon scanner performs OCR in hardware in a single pass that is as fast or faster than the Fujitsu's scan only.

If you, like I, plan to scan stacks of documents into searchable archives, it would be an incredibly slow process. You can drag files to the OCR engine later, but there doesn't seem to be any way to batch them and let them run overnight, for example. Mine may be going up on ebay soon.

And I never looked back... [Posted on 2007-12-06]
This product was something that I had wanted to try and that I had really believed in, but was unsure of. It was expensive, and I wasn't convinced I would use it enough, or that it would do all it said. I bought it after installing Devon Think Pro, and the two products work wonderfully well together.

Other reviews mention slow OCR, but I have frankly had great luck with the OCR. We recently got married and I took all contracts, pictures, diagrams, napkins, ideas, etc. and scanned them in. When I needed to reference something, I just typed in a quick search term and jumped right to all of the places it occurred in my docs. Now all of my bills, invoices, receipts, ideas, etc. wind up in there. Devon Think allows you to also create your own notes, docs, and link to other files of many different formats, so that you can easily bridge the electronic and printed world.

It is easily the best money I have spent on organizing my life; as essential as a hard drive.

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