Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 review

Most sheet-feed scanners are bulky, desk-bound devices, but the ScanSnap S300 is the smallest A4 scanner we've ever reviewed and is designed to fit into a bag with a laptop.

It can hold up to 10 A4 pages and can simultaneously scan both sides. It comes with both mains and USB power adaptors, but USB power requires two ports on your computer and scans run at around half the speed.

Scanning a 10-page colour document at its lowest resolution took 59 seconds. At 150dpi, this setting (labelled Normal) is suitable only for the most basic document archival. Although font sizes as small as 5pt were captured accurately, letters looked rough around the edges. Higher-resolution scans took longer - a single colour A4 page at 600dpi took 45 seconds to scan, but we couldn't fault the quality. Colours were generally accurate, but yellow tones were slightly oversaturated.

Installation was simple, though not quick. The S300 will work only if you use Fujitsu's own software. There's no TWAIN or WIA driver, so you can't use it directly with other document management programs. Fortunately, the ScanSnap Organiser software is excellent and did a far better job of managing scanned documents than its competitors, such as the basic versions of Nuance's Omnipage and PaperPort programs that come with many HP and Canon scanners.

ScanSnap Organiser automatically collated our documents into PDF files, correctly orienting them and discarding blank pages as it went. Scanned documents were compressed before being saved. Embedded OCR software can process scanned pages and transform them into fully searchable PDFs, which is a great feature. This took a long time but the results were outstanding. There's no way to combine PDFs after they've been scanned, or to create batch-scan jobs of more than 10 pages.

The S300 also comes with CardMinder business card-scanning software. This wasn't as good at recognising names and numbers as other business card OCR programs we've seen, such as IRIS's Cardiris Pro. It couldn't read cards that were scanned upside down and, like most business card-readers, couldn't handle dark cards with pale fonts.

The S300 is inexpensive compared to most sheet-feed scanners. We were impressed by the effective document management software and accurate, searchable PDFs. We'd have liked a batch-scan feature and the option of using other programs, but there's little else to fault. It's no use if you want to scan photos or artwork and its small tray isn't hugely convenient, but its compact size makes it a perfect choice if space is limited.

Author: Kat Orphanides