Through a scanner...compactly?
April 9, 2016 6:19 PM   Subscribe

Looking for recommendations for a relatively heavy-duty home scanner. Requirements within.

I'm looking for a home scanner that will enable me to scan double-sided batches of 25 pages with black-and-white text and a little bit of color markup and make them into compact PDF files (~5-6 MB). I will probably need to use the scanner about 5-6 times per month for 3-4 25-page batches at a time. If the scanning process is much slower than office-copier speed, that's okay. I'd be willing to spend around $500, which seems not wildly unreasonable based on a cursory search, but if I'm way off base, that would be helpful to know.

Bonus question: Would it be easier and way cheaper to go to a FedEx/Kinko's and use one of their presumably higher-intensity machines? I know that's an option that exists but haven't looked into it yet.

Thanks, Mefites.
posted by Argyle Road to Technology (8 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: That sounds like Fujitsu ScanSnap territory.
posted by holgate at 6:24 PM on April 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


Best answer: Seconding the above; I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i at the recommendation of this wirecutter article, and it works great for that sort of usage.
posted by Aleyn at 6:31 PM on April 9, 2016


Best answer: I love my ScanSnap. Highly recommended.
posted by clone boulevard at 6:32 PM on April 9, 2016


Best answer: We used ScanSnaps at an office for _way_ more paper than you're talking about.
posted by gregr at 6:34 PM on April 9, 2016


Response by poster: Whoa, that's the most (and speediest) consensus I have ever seen on AskMe. Thanks, everyone, guess I will be getting a Scan Snap!
posted by Argyle Road at 7:09 PM on April 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I had one for 5 years that wasn't compatible with Windows 7. I didn't upgrade from XP for years years on account of it. I was at a conference yesterday and Fujitsu was in the exhibitor hall with the current 7/8/10 version. I said "it looks the same" as the one I bought in 2004. The salesperson said "we don't mess with perfection."
posted by MattD at 10:43 PM on April 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Yep, adding to the chorus to say we've got two ScanSnaps in my office, one about a decade old and one a couple years old. They never die. The old one is still working perfectly. And yeah, they can handle thousands of pages a month, no problem.

It is the rare product that is essentially perfect at its task.
posted by spitbull at 3:10 AM on April 10, 2016


Best answer: They're right, you want the Fujitsu Scansnap ix500. It's one of those things like a label maker that once you have it, you really don't understand how you ever did without it.

And what's cool is you can program different presets for different tasks. It's very powerful. And simultaneously very simple. Like they said, it is essentially perfect.

Oh, and it's very compact too! And cool looking!
posted by bluesky78987 at 8:45 AM on April 10, 2016


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