The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100 ($229) is one of the most impressive portable document scanners we've ever seen, though it's off the mark in small ways. On balance, however, the good points—from small size to OCR accuracy—far outweigh any problems, making the iX100 ($209.99 at Amazon)  our new favorite for portable scanning without a computer.

Like the two scanners it replaces as Editors' Choice—the Visioneer Mobility ($75.89 at Amazon) and the Xerox Mobile Scanner —the iX100's strongest point is that it offers a good solution to the biggest problem with PC-free scanning. In all three cases, you can check the quality of each scan on your phone or tablet while you still have the original handy to rescan if necessary. Even better, you can use your mobile device to work with the file, email it, or upload it to the cloud without having to wait to get back to a PC.

The Basics

The iX100 is a convenient size and weight for a portable scanner at 1.4 by 10.7 by 1.9 inches (HWD) and just 14 ounces. It doesn't come with a carrying case, but Fujitsu offers both soft and hard cases as options ($26.99 for either).

Basic setup consists of connecting the iX100 to a computer with the supplied USB cable to charge its permanently installed lithium battery, and downloading and installing the ScanSnap mobile scanning app to your mobile device or devices. For my tests, I used an Android phone. You can also download apps for Kindle Fire and iOS.

You actually have two options for connecting to the scanner. If you set the scanner up on Wi-Fi network, you can connect to it through a Wi-Fi access point, although you're limited to connecting from computers that are also connected by Wi-Fi rather than Ethernet. To truly take advantage of its portability, you'll want use Wi-Fi Direct, as I did for my tests, to connect directly to the scanner.

Setting up the connection is straightforward. Set the scanner's Wi-Fi switch to On, open the front panel to turn on the scanner, and launch the app on your phone or tablet. The first time you connect, you have to enter the scanner's security key and password, with the app guiding you through each step and showing you where to find the information. After that, the app will remember the settings and automatically connect when your mobile device sees that the scanner is available.

Scanning

Opening the front panel to turn on the scanner also uncovers the manual-feed slot. To scan, you put the first page into the slot far enough for the feed mechanism to grab it, and then tap the Scan button in the app. When the page finishes, the app will show you the image. You can then either put another page in the front slot or tap the Exit button to tell the app you're done. I timed a single page at about 10 seconds for the entire process.

Fujitsu says you can scan 260 letter-size pages on a full battery charge. The scanning is simplex (one-sided) only, but you can easily turn the page over and run it through a second time for duplex (two-sided) originals.

When you finish with the last page and choose Exit, the app will take you to a list of scanned files. You can open any file to look at it more carefully and use your mobile device's built-in features or any apps on the device to work with the file, email it, or upload it to a cloud service.

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The scan app offers a few settings you might want to change. The most important is choosing between image PDF and JPG file format. You can also set Color Mode and Image Quality, but for most purposes you can leave both on the default Auto setting and get good results.

One small convenience is a choice of output paths. Normally the paper takes a straight-through path going in the front slot and out the back. If space is tight, however, you can flip up the top cover to guide the paper straight up, in a right-angle path, from the back of the scanner. A potentially more useful extra is that you can feed more than one small original—like business cards or receipts—at a time, and keep feeding them as quickly as you like. The app will recognize each as a separate image, so if you're scanning to JPG format, each will go in its own file.

Fujitsu includes a set of programs you can optionally install on your PC, including Fujitsu's scan utility; its document management, business card, and receipts handling programs; and an integrated version of Abbyy FineReader for optical character recognition (OCR). The FineReader module can recognize text and save scanned documents to searchable PDF (sPDF), Microsoft Word (DOCX), Excel (XLXS), and PowerPoint (PPTX) formats.

If you connect the scanner to your PC by USB cable or by Wi-Fi, you can use these programs to scan directly to the PC. You can also use most of them with files you scan to your mobile device and move to the PC later. The one exception is the business-card program, which can't import already existing files. This is an odd oversight, considering that the same isn't true for the receipts program. By letting you import files, the receipts program gives you the ability to scan items while you're on a business trip and not have to keep all the paper versions you collect while traveling. It would be more than a little useful to do the same with business cards. Fujitsu says it's hoping to add the feature to a future upgrade of the business card program.

Results

The iX100 and FineReader did a good job on text recognition in my tests, reading our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 6 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. That makes it about as useful for OCR as any scanner without an ADF or duplexing can get.

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Fujitsu's document management program isn't as capable as Nuance PaperPort, which comes with both the Visioneer Mobility and the Xerox Mobile Scanner, but it does a reasonably good job. It lets you turn image PDF files into sPDF format, and it takes advantage of Windows Desktop Search—or Spotlight, if you're using a Mac—to let you find files using a full text search of all sPDF files in the folders defined in the particular search engine.

The combination of scanner and software did not do as well as it should on either business cards or receipts. With business cards, it made three or more serious errors on about a third of the cards in our test suite and at least one error on almost all of them. With receipts, it read the price wrong on 8 out of 10 receipts. That said, it did well enough on business cards to save time over typing everything in by hand. And even if you have to reenter the information from all of the receipts, you'll probably prefer having images to deal with instead of paper. You should also find the program useful for organizing the receipts.

If you need a scanner plus software that does a particularly good job on business cards, or if you want one that comes with a more capable document management program, you'll be better off with either the Visioneer Mobility or Xerox Mobile Scanner. However, the Visioneer model connects to mobile devices by USB cable and the Xerox model connects using an Eye-Fi card, which doesn't have quite the simplicity of using the iX100's built-in Wi-Fi direct.

Both the Xerox and Visioneer scanners are also bigger and heavier than the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100, making them less convenient traveling companions. I'd like the iX100 even more if its software were fully a match for the programs that come with the Xerox and Visioneer scanners. But the software is good enough to be useful, and given that it's a portable scanner, you might not even bother installing the PC-based programs. More important, the iX100 is fast, easy to set up, easy to use, and hard to beat for portable scanning. That's more than enough to make it our Editors' Choice mobile scanner.

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