Hear all about the Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 on our latest Episode of Thinkmac Reviews.

Host: Jonathan Cost / Co-host: Tim Verpoorten
Running time: 32:37  Subscribe in iTunes / Listen Here

Going Paperless is all the buzz right now. Fujitsu has a new mobile scanner that might just do the trick. Fujitsu's Scansnap S1300 is a perfect companion to the road warrior or the guy/gal with a small office at home.

Setup

Setup is painless and you can be up and running in under 10 minutes.  You follow the quick start guide and install the software on your Mac or PC. You do this first, and  and once it's done, plug in your scanner, flip the top open and when the solid blue light illuminates it's ready to scan. Insert your document and it launches the scanning tools, the Scansnap Manager.  You have to keep the Scansnap software running, or this won't work and the blue light will flash at you until it is launched. By default, it will make it a login item, so it's always going to be open down in your Dock.

Hardware Requirements

Fujitsu recommeds at least 1.83 Core duo and USB interface. If you use a slower processor, scanning will slow down.

Software

You get the Scansnap manager, which is the interface to the scanner. After you scan the document, you choose how you want to manage it with the Scansnap manager. It's there that you choose to launch the appropriate applications to scan in business cards (Card Iris) or scan to MS Word / Excel (ABBYY FineReader in the background for conversion). Other options are to scan it to a folder, email message, or an iPhoto image.

Each of these options makes it very easy to manipulate the scanned document. Some might see using the Scansnap S1300 as a negative, since it doesn't use the standard TWAIN drivers to interface with 3rd party applications. However, I found that once you use the Scansnap to get your document inside of your Mac, then you can usually import your document into whatever tool you wish.