Nearly everything in our lives has gone digital, but photos, receipts, and docs like newspaper clippings and electricity bills still come at us on a daily basis. Unfortunately, getting all that paper into your Mac isn’t as easy as cramming it into the disc slot, but Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1100 is probably the next best thing.
Measuring only 10.7x1.9x1.3 inches and weighing a mere 12.3 ounces, the ScanSnap is small enough to carry anywhere. It gets its power straight from your Mac via the bundled USB cable, so you don’t have to worry about carrying an AC adapter or finding a wall outlet. Opening the flap turns the device on, lighting its single button blue. Place your sheet and press the button to start scanning. By default, ScanSnap will keep on accepting more pages until you press the blue button again, which is great for feeding multipage documents.
Take ScanSnap anywhere you need to quickly capture paper-based info.
Saving a file into iPhoto is obviously ideal for loose snapshots, but even at the max 600dpi resolution, the results aren’t as good as a proper flatbed scanner—our test shots ended up with weird lines and other visual noise. The ScanSnap is simple, but this may not be the scanner you are looking for if you’re in charge of the family photo archive.
The Quick Menu window is easy to customize to make it work the way you need it to.
If you need to customize beyond the presets, ScanSnap offers options in spades. You can simplify the Profile menu further by disabling any option you don’t need, or on the flip side, you can manually choose the quality of the scan (the higher the quality, the longer the scan), the size of the paper you’ll be using, whether or not to scan in color, and even if you’d like any PDF file you create to be indexable, invoking ScanSnap’s OCR capabilities—either on the first page or throughout the document. If time is of the essence, you can skip the OCR step and do it later—although you can’t OCR documents that weren’t scanned by the ScanSnap software.
The bottom line. The quality of photo scans stumbles, but for all sorts of text-based documents, the ScanSnap S1100 is a mighty mini scanner.
ScanSnap S1100 Portable Scanner
Mac OS 10.4 or later, USB port
Portable design. Easy to use with default settings.
Can be a little slow. Not suited for scanning photographs. Scans one sheet at a time.
