Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 Document Scanner: Best on the Planet?

On a Quest

The wife and I were getting ready to move but we had boxes and boxes of papers and files that we didn’t really want to drag around again. I mean, come on, it’s paper with ink on it. And with enough ink and paper, it can be a backbreaking experience hauling it all over the United States. So, my wife and I decided to digitize as much of all of this paperwork as we could. After all, a small thumb drive versus a dolly full of boxes? Which to choose? Which to choose? It’s the very definition of a no-brainer if you ask me.

So I went on a quest to find an affordable but reliable sheet fed scanner to scan perhaps thousands of documents. Some might even call it an obsession, but I dismiss that kind of thinking totally. I could have stopped looking at any time, but fortunately I didn’t.

Obviously price is always relative, so I initially set a ceiling at about $250. Well, good scanners exist but they’re far more expensive than $250. The first one that caught my attention was the NeatDesk scanner. I think I even had heard about it on a radio program I was listening to a while ago. It promised the world and then some. It would solve all your paper organization problems. Then I went online and read some of the reviews about the accompanying software. Ouch. Lots of negative comments about how long it took to process what was scanned. The scanner was good for what it did but the software hindered it and rendered it ineffective for the long term. I did see some used NeatDesk machines on ebay but again the reviews of the software is what killed it for me. I will be doing a review of the scanner in the near future.

When I stumbled across the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i scanner, I think it was, I was impressed. However, it was a 3-4 year old machine so certainly the company had upgraded. I did my usual perusal through the tons of Amazon reviews and sure enough, there was one machine that consistently outperformed the older Fujitsu, it was the ScanSnap ix500.The only problem was that it was out of my price range.

I probably should stop here and tell you a little about about our situation. We wanted to move across the country with very little in the way of baggage. No boxes full of files. No cabinets full of files and paper. We wanted to be paperless to use a colloquialism, but in our case, we wanted to do that in a bad way. But the kicker was we only had a month to get it all taken care of. So now, here’s a machine that is almost double what I was wanting to pay but it was supposed to do the job well. The other thing was my wife was going away for a weekend so I’d be able to concentrate on getting all my files scanned. Could this scanner do it? I was skeptical only because I had made purchases before that didn’t live up to their hype, so could this sheet fed ScanSnap ix500 scanner do the job?

The Purchase

I made the purchase on ebay late on Monday afternoon. It was on my doorstop by Wednesday at noon. It just so happened that the shipping place of buy (dot com?) was not far from my home in a different state. Not bad for starters.

I carefully unpacked the box for a couple of reasons. First, my intention in this entire ordeal was to buy it, use it, and sell it as used on Ebay or Amazon. I would lose probably about $50 but it would be worth it not having to lug around all that excess paper ever again. So I wanted to be careful to keep everything.

I was surprised at how small the machine was. It had folding paper feed, and a receiving tray. It was even smaller than my tiny Samsung ML-1865W black and white laser printer. It’s compact and that’s good because I wanted to be able to move it around at will.

I inserted the CD into my computer and followed the instructions for installing it. It walked me through setup of the software, and then prompted me to plug in the scanner, and then to connect the scanner to the computer. One last prompt asked me if I wanted to setup the wireless part of the scanner. Sure, why not. That took another 30 seconds. Literally.


Then I was free to scan. Just like that. I inserted my first batch of papers into top of the scanner and pressed the blue LED. Zip zip zip. The first pdf appeared on my screen and prompted me where to send the file. That was a little confusing to me since it’s not clear when it says Scan to Dropbox whether that means the file goes automatically to dropbox or whether it’s placed in a “holding” area and then you can upload to dropbox later. I think it’s the latter but I’m not sure. It is getting stored on my hard drive and you can tell it to send it to its own ScanSnap cabinet.

So I had perhaps four full notebooks full of papers. It says it’ll take only 50 at a time but I’ve already maxed it out at 65, though I think 50 is the optimum limit. Fifty-five pages was pushing it. The 65 were thinner pages. When the machine is scanning the paper, you see come up on the screen as it is scanned. It will recognize double-sided papers and will record it as a second page. So conceivably you can scan 100 pages in a couple of minutes.

One quirk about the receiving tray: it doesn’t lay flat on the table; it’s sort of curved so when the sheets are scanned and goes to the output tray, some of the pages catch on the previous page and they don’t stack well. It’s really minor because after you’re done with the pages, you just toss them. It doesn’t mess up the actual pages, just how it ends. In other words, you don’t have a stack of 50 pages after they’re all scanned; instead you have what looks like 50 playing cards spanned as you’re playing cards, if that makes sense.

I got through all four notebooks in a couple of hours without hardly trying. It jammed only once and that was because the actual paper was scrunched at the bottom. The machine stopped, and the computer prompted me if I wanted to continue or delete (not sure the wording). Whatever the wording, it was obvious what to do. I cleared the machine (didn’t need it to be scanned anyhow) and pressed Continue. Boom, it continued and hardly missed a beat.I was proceeding so quickly that I gave it a rest because it’s not supposed to be a “heavy duty cycle” machine, just one that scans paper. Well, so far, after about 1200 pages, it’s working well. I’m glad I spent the extra money to get this. And I may end up keeping it. It’s a handy little machine.Summary

So, let me summarize. It’s a very fast scanner that sends documents straight to a PDF. It’s easy to install, operate, and configure.The Bad

The downsides were the receiving/output tray was a bit funky (not flat, sort of curved upwards),not sure how the files get sent to dropbox (or Evernote), and the price. Thin pages with a bit of crinkles may not do well, but then again, would they do well in the commercial-type machines? It’s doubtful. While the price of these smaller home scanners is not outrageous, it’s not exactly entry level either. I’m glad I bought it. Now the big question for me is, after I’ve done all my scanning, will I keep it? I wish I knew. As I continue to test it and put it through the motions, I probably will keep the machine and scan every piece of paper I touch.

Oh, and while I’m on that subject, there is supposed to be a searchable feature to the scanned PDFs. Obviously that will not do you a bit of good if you are scanning diagrams or photos, that is, unless the photos and diagrams have been labeled or “tagged.” I haven’t explored the option just yet but before I write the last word on this great piece of scanning equipment, I will have used it and will see how it did.

To in summary, the Fujitsu SnapScan ix500 in my opinion is a good buy. Why? It just works. That’s the best way to sum it up. It just works. It’s a great value for what you pay for it. It’s quick and very easy to setup and store.

I wish I could have tried to more moderately priced ScanSnap S1300, but then again, I was dealing with a limited time frame. I still am under that limitation and couldn’t afford to spend time rescanning or waiting for the scan to process. At least, that’s what some of the reviews said about it.

A little note, I mistakenly tried to send some pages through the machine with the bottom door closed. It worked and the paper didn’t curl into the receiving tray. Instead the paper ended up flat on the table.

It doesn’t do well with spiral notebook paper because it jams quite easily. I got around that by clipping a straight line alone the edge to eliminate the partially torn bits of notebook paper.

Oh, and here’s another tidbit advice: remove the stables from pages before sending the pages through. That’s been the cause of a little frustration and after the first page went through, I should have learned my lesson. The desktop scanner just does not do well with stables – nor do I think it intended to do be used with staples still in the paper. I haven’t really noticed any marks on the pages from where the staple might have scraped the “eye” but I think it is a receded part so it would be difficult to scratch it. The scanner will continue to scan even as a page has gone sideways before it stops. That’s when you get to see the really odd looking capture on your computer screen. That’s all it is a photocopy of your page as it’s going through the machine. I’ll also assume that the scanner will not handle paper clips either but I haven’t tried and probably won’t make the effort. Just remove staples and paper clips before lining up the documents.Why would I want to think about damaging a perfectly good machine just because I wanted to experiment?

When you do line up the documents, they get inserted so that the first page is facing the back of the machine. There’s a little icon on the feed that notes it. However, since it’s a double sided scanner, does it matter at all which side goes in first. It does if you want to keep your pages in order.

Here’s a neat little trick I learned while doing this: if I am going to be tossing the pages soon after scanning, then instead of using a staple remover, just tear off the corner of the page that has the staple in it. It’s fast and saves you a bunch of time. It doesn’t quite work with a stack of pages but most of the time, you can just tear it. Obviously you wouldn’t want to do that papers such as certificates that you want to keep but you get the idea.

I continue to add to this post because it’s really a continuation of my testing of this scanner. The one area I recently tested was with photographs. Actually, it was with one large 8×10 original photograph of a singing group I was in 25 years ago. I was skeptical about sending it through the scanner because it was a thicker piece of paper. Also, there was a large paper listing all on the photo taped or glued to the back of the photo. Well, needless to say it went through the scanner fine and captured both sides. It’s now in a pdf. I’m including a screen shot of a portion of that scanned photo. So, it’s a screen shot of a scanned photograph! Stop and think about the technology that went into that sentence! As you can see, not bad quality. Okay, so it’s sideways, but you get the idea of it. I will be experimenting with more photographs a little later today and will provide more analysis.

Later that night I read that this particular model is not a good candidate for photo scanning. Ok, fine. The machine does in fact work as I demonstrated above but it’s not the ideal machine to do scan your photos.

Unfortunately.

Instead, you might consider purchasing one that will feed the photos one by one through, and output as a scanned jpg or gif. The article even said that when you run photos through this machine, you run the risk of tearing the original photo.

Ouch. That would be a real bummer.

Plus if the picture is torn, then you will not have one that was scanned. I’m researching this because I’m sure there are decent quality photo scanners on the market. Otherwise, you can take your box of photographs to the latest big box store and have them do it for pennies. Actually, you would have to do it yourself as they normally do not have the personnel to run hundreds or thousands of photos through their machines.

Has my view of this product diminished? Not at all because I had no intention of scanning photographs. It was the documents I was keen on scanning, and as noted, this machine performed flawlessly.

So, are there other features of the SnapScan ix500 scanner that I didn’t cover? Absolutely. I didn’t cover them because I had no need to use them. For me the scanner performed without so much of a hiccup. No delays in software processing scanned images, no lockups of the hardware because of sheets fed through it, and a very easy-to-use and install device. I only wish more technology was this simple and painless.

Click here for more information about the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 Sheet Fed Desktop Scanner