The Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOX ($495 list) is only 5.9 by 11.2 by 5.7 inches (HWD), but Fujitsu has packed a lot of scanner into this small package, with a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF), a 15-sheet-per-minute scan speed, the ability to scan both sides of a sheet at once (boosting speed to 30 pages—15 double-sided sheets—per minute), as well as an optical resolution of 600 pixels per inch.

The ScanSnap takes a unique approach to the scanning process. It comes with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard and focuses on scanning to PDF format, with JPEG as a second choice. Once installed, if you press the scan button, the software scans to PDF format and opens Acrobat. In our tests, it worked faster than the company claims, taking 1 minute 51 seconds to scan both sides of 30 pages, save them, and open the file. The software also automatically rotates pages to the right orientation and leaves out blank pages by default.

A bothersome oversight is the lack of a Twain or WIA driver. That means you can't give a scan command from within Photoshop, for example, or from your favorite OCR program. You can define Photoshop as the program to scan to, however, and then use the button on the scanner to scan and let the software open Photoshop with the scanned file showing. You can also do a similar process with Microsoft Outlook to send e-mail with the scanned document as an attachment. Most OCR programs can read the PDF format, but if yours doesn't, you can use Adobe Acrobat's limited OCR feature.

Switching among programs to scan to is not as easy as it should be. You can define up to five programs and switch from one to another by simply picking one from a list. You do, however, have to go to a setup screen to get to the list instead of just picking an option on a first-level menu.

The ScanSnap is also the most capable business-card scanner we've seen. It comes with its own software to scan and recognize text on business cards, store the information, and transfer it to other programs, including Outlook, which we tested with. Scanning 15 cards in 60 seconds on our tests, the ScanSnap seamlessly feeds a stack of cards through the ADF and reads both sides of the card at once, blowing away dedicated (though less expensive) card scanners like the Corex CardScan Executive 600.

We wish it had a Twain or WIA driver and more buttons—even if they were included in an on-screen control panel—to let us scan to different programs without having to go to the setup screen and change the program we're scanning to. Nevertheless, the ScanSnap has a lot to like, especially if you have many pages to scan and want to spend as little time as possible scanning them.

Subratings:
Photo: N/A
Slides: N/A
Business Cards:
Documents:

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