Makes scans lickety-split.

The ScanSnap S510M is the latest in a line of blazingly fast sheet scanners that specialize in printed paper. A stack of text pages from a report, pamphlets, flyers, forms, and more—if it’s printed, chances are the S510M can scan it.

The S510M looks a lot like its predecessor, the ScanSnap S500M (4 out of 5 stars, 05/07, p64), and it’s just as easy to install. All you need is the scanner driver to get going with the S510M, but it also comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional (a $450 app) and a ScanSnap version of Abbyy FineReader 3.0, which performs optical character recognition (OCR). The scanner plugs into your Mac via USB, and when you want to scan, you just launch the driver, load your documents, and hit the S510M’s Scan button.

At its default Normal mode (150 dpi for color, 300 dpi for black and white; documents with color graphics and black text are scanned at the color setting), the S510M scanned at a rate of 17 pages per minute, and that’s with a double-sided document. That’s not far from Fujitsu’s 18ppm rating. A scan of a ten-page, double-sided color document with pictures and text took a quick 4 minutes at the S510M’s highest resolution (600 dpi).

The S510M saves files as PDFs or JPEGs, and had no problem handling varying paper sizes stacked into the feeder; the scanner has a setting for automatic paper size detection. We also tried scanning a stack of 4-by-6 color photos at the highest resolution, with imperfect results—we saw image noise and some banding in gradients. But while the photo quality isn’t as good as a flatbed photo scanner, for most documents it’s quite acceptable.

The bottom line. Attack that mountain of documents with the S510M. It’ll put you one step closer to the paperless office

COMPANY: Fujitsu

CONTACT: scansnap.fujitsu.com

PRICE: $495

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.8 or later, USB

Fast fast, fast. Good image quality for text and business graphics. Easy to use. Can scan varying paper sizes in a batch.

Mediocre photo reproduction quality. Pricey.