Hmmm.... does it make me pathetic to call the sexy little black number my new love? Whatever, it's my life and if I decide the black and silver plastic mechanism is the one that captures my heart at the moment then so be it.
I waited impatiently for the UPS man to arrive with my package yesterday. As soon as the brown truck pulled along the side of the curb, I was out the door greeting the delivery man. First glimpse of my new office mate was quite exciting. Come to think of it, I should've taken a picture with the UPS man holding my spanking new ScanSnap S510, although he probably wouldn't have time to spare since this is holiday season and all - many more packages to deliver.
I want to clarify, this is a document scanner we are talking about.. not some other plastic mechanism. PG people.. PG...
Ah.. I was giggly when I first held my love. It's packaging was just about the same size as my XP Shuttle. Quite tiny. Once I safely carried it into my room, it was time to examine the goods.
Out came the instruction manual, the warranty card, the power, and then... behold.. the main prize - tada! My own super duper scanner. Bliss. Total bliss. I took several snapshots of this glorious occasion with my camera. These are the moments worth remembering.
Yes, Christmas has came early for me. If you are not troubled by the endless amounts of paper piled up in your office, in the endless folders crammed into the cabinets and desk drawers, you'll have little appreciation for any type of scanning equipment. If you are one of the lucky ones, this post will not be too interesting. But if you share my enthusiasm to reduce paper records, read on!
Gotten a little off track there, here we go, back to the magnificent machine.
There are several CDs that came with the machine, the Acrobat 8 Standard (with supported languages: Brazilian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and German), the ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap 3.0, ScanSnap S510 Setup CD, and the trial version of Rack2-Filer V4.0. A little good follower of steps and procedures, I actually opened the manual and read the instructions to setup my ScanSnap. The process was relatively straightforward. Install the Acrobat, the ABBYY FineReader, the ScanSnap apps, and then plug in the scanner to the computer and power it on.
Once the little green button lights up, it was time to give it a whirl. Where to start? I have so many things to scan in. After a 10 second deliberation, I decided to tackle my medical files from several years back. Reading from other posts that staple holes sometimes can jam the feeder, I was careful to remove the staples from the pages and did a quick smoothing out of the punctured holes. Once my preferences for Scan button was set, it was time to scan.
Placed the document on the feeder and one press of the big, green button. Before I even had the chance to get out of my chair and do my happy dance while singing "Happy happy joy joy, happy happy joy joy!" the first page of my document was already scanned, sitting pretty in the designated folder, all ready for me to rename it to my liking.
Fast! So fast!
Within 3 hours, I think I've scanned and organized over 150 pages already. And 90% of that time was spent OCRing, renaming the PDF files, moving them to the correct folders. Pretty dam impressive. If I had to use my flatbed, I would've probably only gotten through 30 pages over that same period.
The OCR is great and the ScanSnap manager software is quite easy to use. The scanned documents using scan image 'Better' was good enough for me.
If anyone is looking for a document scanner, that's fast and simple to use, I highly recommend getting a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 (windows, for those in the Mac tribe, look for S510M). I purchased this scanner for documents only. For my photos, I will still stick to using a flatbed for the sole reason that not matter what, for photos, I do not like the idea of anything moving touching the photos.
Now, I just need to find a good place to safely store all my electronic data... that's for another day and another research project.
Invest in a good document scanner and be on your merry way to becoming clutter free!
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