Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Sheet-fed Scanner

When I heard about the concept of a sheet-fed scanner, I started looking for one. Our legal group was laboriously scanning contracts a page at a time via a flat bed scanner. We found this nifty little device, read the reviews, decided to give it a shot, and the legal group is now much happier.Pros:* Fast. Even with the quality turned up, this scans an entire contract in the time the our Canon flatbed takes to warm up.* Easy. Once you get the software installed and tweak any settings you feel like tweaking, scanning involves hitting a green button on the face of the scanner and clicking a single button on the screen. The provided software gives you a thumbnail of each document, lets you easily rename the documents, lets you double-click to view in Adobe or a program of your choice, lets you drag-and-drop documents to the desktop, etc.* Cute. Okay, 'cute' is probably not a selling point for most IT departments, but it really is! It has a very small footprint and a clean design in black and silver. The blue power LED lights up in welcome when you open the document feed cover.* Paper jams are easy to clear. There's a single silver button that gives easy access to the paper path.* No Engrish. The manual and software is refreshingly free of mutilated Japanese to "Engrish" translations. I only noticed one or two minor translation glitches.* Good OCR software. I experimented with searchable PDFs, and the software does a good job of text recognition.* Good software. I'll be honest, one reason I chose the Fujitsu over a similar Canon product is because I have never liked the look, feel, or usage of Canon's software. I don't know what the Canon would have been like, but I like the Fujitsu software. The out-of-the-box defaults work well, the settings are easy to tweak if you need to, and the ScanSnap Manager is intuitive and easy. There are many, many software options that I haven't tried and probably will never try, but it's nice to have them there just in case I ever need them.* Can scan receipts. It comes with a plastic sleeve that you can put clippings or smaller pieces of paper inside of for scanning.Cons:* Minorly annoying software installation. There are three different disks to install from -- four if you count a disk full of trial software. Some of the installation processes have been tweaked since the manual was originally printed, so there are extra paper inserts to describe the new steps. If you get confused, look through all the manuals and inserts until you find screenshots that match what is happening on the screen.* Doesn't have a TWAIN driver, as has been stated before, but who cares? It works seamlessly and quickly with the provided software, so this is only a theoretically downside for me.* Not flat bed quality. If you want exact duplicates of documents without noise or artifacts, get a flat bed. If you want fast and easy scans and are okay with slightly lower quality, go for it.* Can jam on faster feed modes. The first document I tried was a 4-page contract that had been stapled in one corner. Turning down the speed, AKA turning up the scan quality, and changing the feed direction solved the problem.* Can jam on curled papers. A packet that has been rolled will not feed well until you flatten the papers a bit.I'd change my review to 4 stars if I could, but I'm still quite happy.

Update 11-2009I have had the machine since 5/2008 and it works great. I would add to my original review that there is an excellent feature where it will ask you after scanning a series of pages if you want to continue scanning. This is great because it allows you to scan a single set of documents of any size, despite the feeder only taking 50 pages at a time.I also noticed the price is now $900?? Truly ludicrous. I know there is a new machine replacing the S510, the S5100 at $400 and there is an Epson model around the same price. I would stay with Fujitsu and buy the S5100 if I were buying a scanner at this time.Original Comments:I have had the scanner going on 24 hours and it works well. I was using a very slow all-in-one HP machine. The scansnap does in 3 minutes what took my HP over 90 minutes.The scansnap software was easy to install but the ABBYY software will not install on my computer. I keep getting an error code. The scanner comes with a ful version of Adobe Acrobat. This adds a lot of value to this purchase!I scan loan packages which saves me a lot of money, and time on next day air. I have already scanned 2 full packages, 85 pages each and it works great. If you are concerned about the 50 page doc feeder being too small, not to worry as the software will allow you to bundle your larger scans into one single file.If you are e-mailing large files, you will need to use a file service such as [...]. These services work very well, are secure and password protected.There just isn't any comparison between a scan and a fax document. The scan comes out nearly as good as the original. You know how faxes look and print. Also, sending an e-mail to multiple recipients is much easier than faxing. While toll charges for faxing inside the US might be cheap, calling internationally might not be. Lastly, you will save paper scanning versus faxing. My fax machine has become obsolete. I receive my faxes with [...] and e-mail all replies.In summary, this is a good machine, probably the best in its price range. Frankly, I think the price could be much lower and I suspect it will be in the future.Update 11-2009I have had the machine since 5/2008 and it works great. I would add to my original review that there is an excellent feature where it will ask you after scanning a series of pages if you want to continue scanning. This is great because it allows you to scan a single set of documents of any size, despite the feeder only taking 50 pages at a time.I also noticed the price is now $[...]. Truly ludicrous. I know there is a new machine replacing the S510, the S5100 at $[...] and there is an Epson model around the same price. I would stay with Fujitsu and buy the S5100 if I were buying a scanner at this time.