Fujitsu Scansnap S300M Scanner for the Mac Review

Since I switched over to the Mac, I am without a scanner. Evening when I was using Windows XP, my Dell multifunction printer/scanner wasn't that good. The document feeder is slow, and image quality is bad.

I saw a few ads on the ScanSnap scanner from Fujitsu. The few reviews that I found seems to say that it is a great scanner. It is not cheap, and the Mac version costs more, which makes NO sense. But I really want to go as paperless as I can, so I bought it.

OUT OF THE BOX

It arrived in a little box, enhancing the mobile/portable scanner image. It comes with all cables including the USB cable. You can power it either via AC adaptor, or via a second USB cable. I went with AC since I am not really using it as a portable scanner.

FAST AND EASY

Setup was easy. I downloaded the latest scan manager software from the Fujitsu website. It is a point release higher than the one supplied on the CD. I was up and running in a few minutes.

First surprise? This thing is fast. Check out the mini video below to see the speed. 

DETAILS

  • I has to use the "high quality" settings t get good results for scanner documents and magazine articles. The result is about 300K of PDF per side.
  • Remember -- this thing scans both sides at the same time. And it has automatic blank page detection. So don't worry about setting it to single side scan unless you explicitly want to avoid getting say, the back side of a magazine article.
  • The document feeder works very well. I scanned soft thing magazine articles, thick letter size documents, thin letter size paper.
  • Remember though, maximum pieces of paper is ten.