Review: Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100

Neat, portable scanner from Fujitsu will suit road warriors

Fujitsu's SnapScan S1100 is a neat, very portable scanner that easily fits into a small bag and gives decent scanned A4 images.

Power and data transfer is achieved courtesy of a mini-USB 2.0 connection, and it has several decent software applications that can use the scanned images it produces.

Specifications
Weighing 400g, and with dimensions of 273 x 48 x 34mm, it fits into a small bag and can be carried easily. However, we would recommend a rigid box to put the scanner in for added protection. Certainly make sure any bag you put it in is carried as hand luggage on any flights you take.

The software provided does a decent job of scanning documents, although it is simplex - i.e. will only scan one side of a double-sided document, and users have to feed in documents manually.

SnapScan software install
Besides the SnapScan software comprising the scanner manager and a scanned document organiser, the S1100 comes with business card management software Cardminder, cloud note and document app Evernote 3.5, ABBYY Finereader for SnapScan, and a Scan to Microsoft SharePoint application [see picture for screenshot of Cardminder application].

The software above took 12 minutes to install on our Labs Core 2 Duo laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate, but the SnapScan software also supports Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista.

There are also trials of Rack2-Filer and ABBYY's PDF Transformer included on the set-up CD as well.

No Twain suport
It would be churlish to complain that the scanner hasn't got an auto feeder or that it hasn't the facility for duplex scanning. However, the fact that it isn't Twain-compliant is very annoying.

Twain is the communications protocol standard for ensuring that devices such as scanners, digital cameras and other graphics packages can communicate between each other.

We discovered the problem when we fired up our CorelDraw X5 graphics package, and went to select the S1100 as a source to acquire a scan.

Scan timings
We scanned a printed document using the S1100, which took less than five seconds when we set the scanner to its automatic resolution setting. When we increased the resolution to its maximum setting of 600dpi colour, the scan took 25 second.

After the scan, a menu pops up giving you options on where to store the scan. We could direct the scan to Excel, PowerPoint or Word using ABBYY's Fine Reader application, drop it into a folder, email it, print it, send it to a SharePoint portal or send it to the other applications bundled with the S1100, such as CardMinder or EverNote.

One option was to convert the scan into a searchable .PDF file by using the onboard optical character recognition (OCR) program, which we could search through using the ‘find' function. With normal fonts we could find specific words, but there were non-standard fonts that were not converted using the onboard OCR program, and so that text would not be searchable in the .PDF.

ScanSnap Manager
The Manager application does a good job of coordinating the scanning process. It's simple and easy to use, and there are sub-options in the manager for setting image quality and colour mode, as well as file naming, determining whether a PDF file created should be searchable, and what language should be used [see picture].

An option to create a scan profile of the various settings might have been a handy tool. Such profiles would contain all the settings for a specific scan - like colour at 600dpi - with the option to scan straight into an Excel spreadsheet.

There's also an option to scan A3 sheets, in Carrier Sheet Settings, by folding the A3 sheet in half, and manually scanning both sides.

ScanSnap Organiser
This application acts as a central repository for the scanned images, and it allows users to set up separate ‘cabinets' for storing the images. We could also send the saved images to all the other applications (CardMinder, EverNote etc ….) installed with the S1100 [see picture].

Conclusions
A neat scanner that is highly portable and has a good range of software to support it. On the negative side, it has to be manually fed, scans one side only, and isn't Twain-compliant, so it doesn't integrate with standard graphics packages, such as CorelDraw. But we still liked it.