Looks like a printer. Acts like a scanner.

The euphoniously named ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM can make quick work of converting paper into digital files. Measuring 11.2 by 5.7 by 5.9 inches, ScanSnap doesn't take up a lot of space, and it looks more like an inkjet printer than a scanner. It connects to your Mac via USB - it takes less than 10 minutes to get the scanner up and running - and the bundled software includes ScanSnap Manager and Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard.

It's easy to set the limited options of the ScanSnap Manager software, which controls the quality of your scans and the format of your image files (you're restricted to JPEG or PDF formats). There are multiple image-quality modes (150, 200, 300, and 600 dpi for color; 300, 400, 600, and 1,200 dpi for black-and-white), and you adjust the compression level for each scan.

To scan, you place your documents into the feeder as you would load paper into a printer. Then you press the Scan button, and ScanSnap goes to work - quite quickly, too. At the lowest resolution, ScanSnap raced thorough our documents, taking 38 seconds to scan 10 pages of text, 59 seconds to scan a 28-page double-sided color document with pictures (ScanSnap can scan both sides of a two-sided page at once - nifty, huh?), and 48 seconds to scan 13 color PowerPoint slides. At its highest resolution, ScanSnap took longer, but it was still fast - just over 7 minutes each for 10 pages of text and a 28-page double-sided document, and close to 5 minutes for the PowerPoint slides. But even at the 1,200 dpi, color-image quality was low - but ScanSnap is an office manager, not a photographer's assistant.

ScanSnap bundles no direct-to-file OCR software, but there's an easy workaround: Scan to PDF, open the file in Acrobat, and convert the scanned text to a text file using Acrobat's Recognize Text Using OCR feature.

The bottom line. ScanSnap can quickly make molehills out of mountains of paper documents.

COMPANY: Fujitsu
CONTACT: 212-599-9800, http://scansnap.fujitsu.com
PRICE: $495
REQUIREMENTS: USB-equipped G4, Mac OS 10.2 or later, 128MB RAM, 500MB disk space
Fast. Compact. Easy to use.
Pricey. Limited software controls.