Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 ($295 direct) isn't unique in offering what are usually desktop conveniences in a portable scanner. However it's one of the of the few, along with the similarly priced Editors' Choice ($295, 4 stars), that includes both an automatic document feeder (ADF) and the ability to scan both sides of a page as quickly as it can scan one side. In truth, the P-150 outshines the S1300 in many ways, from its faster speed to its smaller size and weight. But the S1300 offers some strengths of its own, including much better business card scanning, to keep it very much in the running.

At 3 by 11.2 by 3.9 inches (HWD), the S1300 is on the large side for a portable, and at 3.1 pounds, it's about a pound heavier than that the P-150. Even so, it's small enough to be reasonably portable or to serve as a particularly small desktop scanner for light duty scanning. The ADF is limited to 10 sheets, which is only half of the P-150's capacity, but it's infinitely better than the one-page at a time manual feed that you'll find on most other portables.

Setup and Software
For my tests, I connected the S1300 to a system running Windows Vista. Set up is reasonably typical. One unusual touch is that, unlike most portables, you can't connect just one USB cable to get it to work. Instead, you have the choice of plugging in a power adaptor also, or plugging in a second USB cable, which means tying up two USB ports.

The software that comes with the S1300 includes a scan utility, a document management program called ScanSnap Organizer, and a business card management program. In addition, an optical character recognition (OCR) module, ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap 4.1, works with both the scan utility and document management program to let you turn scanned documents into editable text or searchable PDF files.

In another unusual touch for scanners in general, the S1300 doesn't come with a driver that would let you scan directly from most Windows programs that have their own scan commands. As I've pointed out in other ScanSnap reviews, most recently my review of the ($199, 3.5 stars), this is standard for Fujitsu's ScanSnap models. Fujitsu insists on locking you into its own idiosyncratic approach to scanning, which you may or may not consider a problem, depending on your own tastes and work habits.

Scanning
In most cases, instead of letting you scan from within a given program, the S1300 makes you scan first and then send the scanned file to the program. However, if you first define the target application in the scan utility, you can scan and send with one command. As an alternative, you can scan and send the file to ScanSnap Organizer, and then use the commands in Organizer to send the file to a program in a separate step.

With either choice, if you send the file to a word processor, the OCR module will convert it to editable text, if you haven't OCRed it already. You can also set the program to save text files as searchable PDFs, or save them as image PDF files and recognize the text later, either automatically when the computer is otherwise idle, or immediately on command.

Ironically, Fujitsu's own business card program, CardMinder, is the one case that breaks the rule of not letting you scan from within a program. With CardMinder you can either scan first and send the scan to the program, or you can open the program first, and give a scan command.

Test Results
The best that can be said of the S1300's speed is that it's acceptable for a portable scanner. In my tests, using a 10 page document, I timed scanning without recognizing the text, at 5.9 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one sided) scans and 11.7 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scans (with one image on each side of the page).

That makes the S1300 a lot faster than any manual feed scanner. On the other hand, the P-150 came in at 10.3 ppm and 19.2 ipm, leaving the S1300 in the dust. The P-150 also took almost no additional time to recognize the text, adding only 4 seconds to OCR 50 pages of text. The S1300 took almost a minute extra to OCR 20 pages.

The S1300's 600 ppi maximum optical resolution is more than enough for high quality document scanning, as indicated by it's scores on our OCR accuracy test. The scanner and software combination read both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. As I've already mentioned, the scanner also did a reasonably good job with business cards, reading about half the cards in our test suite without a mistake.

Although the S1300 can't match the P-150 for size, weight, or speed, and it loses points for lacking a standard driver, it's actually a little easier to setup than the P-150, and I suspect that anyone who isn't already familiar with scanning will find the software easier to use than most typical scan software. The S1300 certainly has the edge over the P-150 for business cards, and it's just as certainly a reasonable choice as a highly capable portable scanner. Unless you absolutely can't live without a standard scan driver, the S1300 is, at the very, least worth a serious look.

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