Fujitsu's S1100: Best Portable Document Scanner Yet

Fujitsu is known for providing businesses with document imaging solutions and has been recognized for many of their products for ease and efficiency. Not too long ago we gave the Fujitsu ScanSnap s300 a try and thought it an ideal travel companion. Not only does it capture documents in excellent color, it is quite portable- they call it the world’s smallest duplex ADF scanner. Best of all, the duplex scanning works great, easily taking in both sides of a document or business card at once. Fujitsu unveiled their newest addition at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier this month, and update to the family and perhaps their best yet. For those of you who lack space on your desk or work area and need an efficient scanner, look no further than the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100.

Not only is this scanner portable, it runs off of a single USB cable. And whereas the earlier model weighed around three pounds, this one barely adds to a load, weighing only a bit over 12 ounces! The S1100 was a cakewalk to use as there is only one button that begins the scan and subsequently opens the ScanSnap Manager, the central program used to choose which destination you are aiming for- OCR scanning for documents, business cards, sending via email, or just quick saving as an image to a folder. If you use Google Docs, suffice it to say you will be in luck as you can scan directly to the cloud.

We particularly liked the business card aspect as CardMinder software is included. We’ve been drowning in business card recently, of all shapes and sizes, and used the S1100 to scan in over 500 cards in a few sessions. The business cards we scanned were to our liking and even international ones with complicated characters were recognized with aplomb. Easy rotation of scanned images, snappy optical character recognition and automatic image rotation, quick zooming into cards for manual editing, super-simple export were pluses… the fact that you couldn’t easily go between fields when editing them and some issues with handling on darker cards (those printed on black paper) were small and forgivable problems. Also, one thing we especially liked was the ease at which the scanner corrected small alignment issues- especially with cards, you could insert them in any direction or orientation, anywhere in the feeder, and it would handle them nicely.

Though this is compatible with both PCs running most any recent Windows OS and Macs running OSX, we would suggest this for those of you who only have a couple pages to scan, and mostly single-sided. The scanner can only handle one page at a time and each one takes about seven to eight seconds to scan a full page- quite a bit slower than some others we’ve tried. Also, this is a simplex scanner, unlike the previous models, which means that you’re only able to grab one side of a page during scanning. You can easily indicate that a document is double sided, but you have to put each page through twice. Another slight downfall is a lack of easy carrying options. Though this is touted as portable, and was easy enough to throw in a bag, we felt it a bit odd that it lacked a case or handles of any kind. Build quality is solid, and we loved one major change- no more consumables!

Finally, the scanner is an excellent buy- previous editions were a bit pricey, around $300. This one is available for $199, and worth every penny.