The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 is the latest document scanner to hit the markets. If your goal is to digitize all of your financial records, legal documents, and other miscellaneous papers on the fly, the ScanSnap S1300 should fit the bill at a fairly inexpensive price. The scanner is portable, scans both sides of a page simultaneously, and offers a variety of choices for saving your scanned files. Fujitsu sent a review unit, and I’ve been putting it through its paces.

Specifications

The ScanSnap S1300 is designed to be a portable document scanner. It’s small enough to fit in a briefcase, and weighs in at only around 3 pounds. The sheet feeder holds 10 pages, and the scanner is capable of feeding cardstock as well as normal printer paper.

The ScanSnap S1300 will scan your documents at a maximum resolution of 600 dpi for color and grayscale documents, or up to 1200 dpi for monochrome documents. It’s by no means the fastest scanner on the market, but does handle 8 pages per minute. If you’re scanning double-sided documents, don’t worry about the scanner slowing down any; the ScanSnap S1300 features twin scanning sensors, so it scans both sides of the page simultaneously.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 includes an AC power adapter, but the scanner can also run off the USB ports on your computer, if you have two USB ports to spare.

The included software is robust, and Fujitsu has included both Windows and Mac software on the same disc. No more downloading those Mac drivers, Fujitsu has included them in the box! The scanning software includes options for scanning to PDF, searchable PDF, and JPEG image files. It also includes OCR software, for scanning documents into Word or Excel. Finally, the Mac software includes CardIris, which allows you to scan your business cards and send them directly to Address Book or Entourage.

Quality and Performance

I scanned well over 500 pages of documents with the review unit Fujitsu sent me. While it is tedious feeding 10 pages at a time, I found the scanner exceeded my expectations for an automatic feed scanner. The paper jammed in the scanner only a couple of times, and those jams were probably caused by the dozens of staple holes in some of the papers I was scanning.

The ScanSnap S1300 does a good job with documents, as expected, creating crisp PDFs that are easy to read and search. The quality wasn’t so great for scanning photographs, but it would probably be acceptable for photos you just plan to publish on a web page.

The Bottom Line

The ScanSnap S1300 is definitely a welcome addition to my office. I’ve actually found myself using the ScanSnap S1300 more often than my Canon CanoScan 8800F, simply because the automatic sheet feeder makes it easy for me to drop packets of paper in, hit the button, and work on other tasks while my documents are being scanned. The portability makes it a great option for traveling business users, since it’s lightweight and compact.