Document Scanner Organizer Mac. Scansnap Ix500 Wireless

The ScanSnap iX500 provides PC and Mac users an effective way to greatly reduce paper clutter, storage space, and security risks associated with unmanaged paperwork at home or the office. For even greater accessibility and usefulness, users can now scan wirelessly to a PC or Mac as well as iOS or Android mobile devices.

• Document Scan Organizer Mac Scansnap Ix500 Wireless

The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 is a very compact document scanner, with wireless remote control capability from a smartphone or a tablet and cloud connection to access all your documents from every web connected device. With its compact and modern design, it fits perfectly in workspaces for daily scanning tasks. Ergonomics The scanner offers a one-touch function and a 'Quick Menu' displayed for each scan, allowing users to select the operation they wish to apply: scan to folder, e-mail, print, Pdf, Word, Excel, SharePoint, iPhoto In order to always offer the latest functionnalities, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 warns the user when a new software version is available.

Features The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 can directly send your documents to your mobile device (iOS and Android) thanks to the WiFi and the ScanSnap connect app, but also to your favorite cloud services like Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs, Salesforce and Sugarsync The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 is packed with automatic processing functions for high image quality: cropping, deskew, page format detection, blank page removal, etc. In order to facilitate research in your digitised documents by indexing keywords, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 allows you to apply an OCR during or after the digitisation process and generate OCR Pdf files. Performance The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 sensibly improves production and reliability: 25 pages/min scanning speed, Unique GI processor unit for instant image enhancement and wireless routing to mobile devices, 50 sheets ADF, ultrasonic double feed detection and a newly developed feeding mechanism to ensure reliable and uninterrupted document feeding.

. Pros Very fast at scanning to searchable PDF. Met its rated simplex and duplex scan speeds. Good optical-character-recognition (OCR). Did well at reading business cards. Misfeed-free in our testing.

Wi-Fi and USB 3.0 connectivity. Cons You can't give a scan command from within an application. Scanning to some programs may require several steps. Only connects wirelessly to one computer at a time. Documentation could use improvement.

Bottom Line The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 is a capable and reliable document scanner that is fast in scanning to searchable PDF and did well in both text recognition and business-card scanning. The Fujitsu iX500 ($495) is a capable and likeable document for personal or small office use. It met its rated speeds in our tests and lost almost no time when saving files to searchable PDF. The scanner did well in both text recognition and business card scanning. It's closely matched in performance and features to the, but the ability to connect wirelessly and scan to mobile devices gives the iX500 the slimmest edge, making it our new Editors' Choice as a low-price document scanner for personal or small-office use. Features The iX500 can be used with either a PC or a Mac, and bundles the same software for each OS; the one exception is that Adobe Acrobat XI is only included in the Window version. It can connect to a computer via a USB cable (including USB 3.0) or via Wi-Fi.

It can scan to Evernote, Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Docs, and Salesforce. You can scan either to a computer or an iOS or Android device.

The scanner can only connect wirelessly to one computer at a time; to switch to another computer you need to first connect to the scanner via USB and run a mobile setup utility on the new machine. It can send scans via Wi-Fi to an iOS or Android mobile device that has the free installed. The scanner comes with built-in dual-core CPU that allows for scanning directly via Wi-Fi to a mobile device without the need for a host computer, so it works as a standalone Wi-Fi scanner. At 6.6 by 11.5 by 6.2 inches (HWD), you shouldn't have trouble finding room for the iX500 on any desk. It supports color duplex scanning, and has a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). Its rated speed is 25ppm for both simplex (one-sided) and duplex (two-sided) scanning for all modes except Excellent.

These include Normal mode (150dpi for color and gray scale, 300 dpi for monochrome); Better mode (200dpi for color and gray scale, 400 dpi for monochrome); Best mode (300dpi for color and gray scale, 600 dpi for monochrome); and Automatic, in which the scanner identifies the type of document and applies appropriate settings. Workflow The iX500, like other Fujitsu scanners, has a workflow that is a bit different than other scanners. The software lacks a Twain driver, which lets you launch a scan from within an application. Instead of that approach, in which the application initiates the scan and 'pulls' the scanned document into the program, the iX500 uses a 'push' method. You scan a document, and then open it in a program of your choice from a menu of recommended programs.

When I tried this, my desired destination, Photoshop, wasn't listed. At the bottom of the screen, however, is an option, Choose Default Program. From there, it was easy to add Photoshop as a destination, and open the file in that program. You can add up to 10 programs this way. You're largely locked into Fujitsu's scanning workflow, which may or may not be ideal for you. For instance, the bundled OCR program (Abbyy FineReader for ScanSnap 5.0) can only read and open files to a few programs, chiefly in the Microsoft Office stable (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

To convert a file into editable text for use in other programs takes a workaround. To open a file in WordPerfect, for instance, you would have open FineReader in your program menu, reset it to save the file to disk, open WordPerfect, and then open the saved file in the program.

I was not able to find this procedure in the manual. In general, the documentation could stand to be improved; there's a lot of information, but it's not always easy to find what you need. The ScanSnap Quick Menu provides an easy method of routing scans, at least to some common destinations.

You can initiate a scan from the Scan button or the ScanSnap Manager utility and send it to the Quick Menu, which lets you then direct it to any of 10 destinations: ScanSnap Organizer; Scan to CardMinder; Scan to Folder; Scan to E-mail; Scan to Print; Scan to Mobile; Scan to Google Docs; Scan to SalesForce Chatter; Abbyy Scan to Word; Abbyy Scan to Excel; Abbyy Scan to PowerPoint; and Scan to Picture Folder. Fast Text Recognition The iX500 is rated at 25ppm for simplex and duplex scanning in all modes and colors (except Excellent mode), and that was borne out in our testing.

In the default Automatic mode, it tested at 25.2ppm for simplex scanning and 24.4ppm (or 48 images per minute, where each side of a page counts as one image) in duplex to image PDF format, so it lost almost no speed in scanning two-sided documents. Even better, it scanned the same 25-page, 50-image document to searchable PDF in just 1 minute, 5 seconds, only 4 seconds longer than it took to scan it to image PDF. Most scanners take considerably longer in scanning to searchable PDF than to image PDF, so the iX500's zippy performance is a big plus. It did nearly as well as the Canon DR-C125—rated at 25ppm/50ipm for simplex and duplex scanning, respectively—which lost absolutely no time in the text-recognition stage required to generate a searchable PDF, taking exactly 60 seconds in scanning our test file to either type of PDF. The, rated at 26ppm and 52ipm for simplex and duplex scanning, respectively, didn't do quite as well as these two prodigies. But the 82.3 seconds it took to scan to searchable PDF, as opposed to 57.6 seconds it took to scan to image PDF, is still a lot better than most scanners. OCR and Business Card Scanning The iX500's optical character recognition (OCR) performance, in combination with Abbyy FineReader for ScanSnap 5.0, was good.

It read our Times New Roman test font down to 8 points without error, and Ariel was perfect down to 6 points. These results exactly match those of the Canon imageFormula DR-C125, though the Canon did slightly better in reading some of our more obscure fonts. For business-card scanning, using CardMinder, the ScanSnap did well.

It read about half of our cards perfectly, and with one or two errors on the rest. The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 is quite a capable document scanner for home or light-duty office use. It matched its rated speeds for simplex and duplex scanning in our testing and showed fast text recognition when scanning to searchable PDF. It did well in business card scanning. It can connect via USB (including USB 3.0) or Wi-Fi, and you can easily scan to a mobile device with the ScanSnap Connection Application. Some aspects of the iX500's workflow (such as the need to 'push' your scans to an application rather than launching the scan from the application) may take some getting used to.

Document Scan Organizer Mac Scansnap Ix500 Wireless

Down to the Wire The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 and Canon imageFormula DR-C125's performances were almost identical in our testing, with the Canon scanner doing ever so slightly better in scanning to searchable PDF and in text recognition. The iX500 has a slightly larger automatic document feeder (ADF), holding 50 sheets to the Canon DR-C125's 30 sheets, but that difference is seldom important in personal or micro-office scanning, especially as one can add more pages as the stack thins. The Fujitsu model gets points for USB 3.0 and Wi-Fi connectivity, and the ability to scan to mobile devices. With the iX500, you're largely confined to Fujitsu's workflow, which may or not be to your liking. If you prefer a workflow that uses a standard driver you'll be better off with the Canon imageFormula DR-C125. If not, these two are so close in capability that you could flip a coin to choose between them and be happy with either one. The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 offers just enough extras, like Wi-Fi connectivity and support for scanning to mobile devices, for it to become the new Editors' Choice as low-price document scanner for personal or micro-office use.