Can a Canon PIXMA MP610 do the same thing as a Fujitsu ScanSnap s510?

October 14, 2008 2:26 PM

My wife just won a Canon PIXMA MP610 printer/scanner. (We have not received it yet.) Can this machine do the paper-digitizing magic of a Fujitsu ScanSnap s510 scanner? Perhaps with additional software? If not, exactly what is it we'd be missing?
posted by winston to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

It's a scanner. By definition, it digitizes paper. Exactly what does the Fujitsu do that you want the Canon to do?
posted by kindall at 3:57 PM on October 14, 2008

Response by poster: The Fujitsu is frequently (including on Ask Mefi) touted as the best tool for eliminating paper. It is supposed to be easier to transform an office full of paper into an organized collection of searchable pdfs with the s510 than with other scanners. Exactly what the s510 has that other scanners lack is part of my question. Based on what I've heard, I wonder if it's more because of the software that comes with it than because of the hardware.
posted by winston at 4:33 PM on October 14, 2008

If you want *searchable* scans, you're looking for "OCR software". There should be a few that work with whatever hardware you have.
posted by Netzapper at 4:41 PM on October 14, 2008

The s510's strength is that it can do lots of paper very easily. You can put a stack of paper in the tray, push the Scan button, and have a PDF copy of the whole stack of paper in seconds. For a standard flatbed scanner, you'd have to lay the first paper on the scanner, scan it, flip it over, scan the back, replace it with the second paper, etc.

It takes a long multi-step process and turns it into a one step process.
posted by JDHarper at 4:45 PM on October 14, 2008

Response by poster: The Canon does have a sheet-feeder. Is there software that will help me create multi-page searchable PDFs (that is, containing both the scan image and the OCR text) at the push of a single button with this scanner?
posted by winston at 4:50 PM on October 14, 2008

I have no idea what the Canon PIXMA can or can't do, but let me tell you, I bought a Scansnap S300M about 2 weeks ago and its already changed the way my home office works. You truly hit 1 button, it whips through the machine and in 3 seconds you have a PDF of the document. I found a droplet online that automates the process of OCR'ing the files as well via Adobe Acrobat Pro. Get one!
posted by AsRuinsAreToRome at 6:27 PM on October 14, 2008

I have a Canon MP810, which I assume may be similar or better than the 610. For school I spent a while trying to scan in some pages, with the paper feeder, that contained only text. It didn't work out too well. It supposedly can do two sided, by doing it once then sucking the paper back into the printer and scanning the other side. What happens in actual use, however, is the paper gets jammed much too often. This means you have to watch all of the action, which, if you have a lot of paper to convert, sucks.

As for OCR, these documents happened to be in Spanish, and the Spanish recognition is simply not present in any of the freeware I found, or the software that came with the printer.

Besides those issues, it is a pretty nice printer.
posted by papayaninja at 8:14 PM on October 15, 2008