Fujitsu ScanSnap S510

Brent Dowell

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Well, I'm posting this as a woodworking tool, cause I'm going to use it to archive a bunch of magazines I can't seem to part with. It should also help to reduce the problems I have with paper around here.

And to top it off, my wife bought it for me for an early birthday present! :thumb:

Ah, she's a keeper, that's for sure...

So I just had to test it out. Had the November 2008 version of WOOD laying on my desk, so I ripped out the staples and used a little sliding paper cutter to cut it right down the middle. Put it back together and set it up on the scanner. Adjusted the settings to 'Best' (although there is one better, called 'excellent', but I haven't used that yet :rofl:).

Pressed the button and let it roll. It scans both sides of the page in one swipe, and a pretty darn fast swipe at that. All 96 (that's 48 doublesided) pages seemed to take only a minute or two to scan.

Once they were loaded into the organizer tool, I told it to do the OCR (optical character recognition) on it and convert it into a searchable PDF. Yup. Searchable text! Amazing... That took a bit longer, somewhere between 5-10 minutes?

And that's it. It really was that simple. I hope I finish my current work project pretty soon and that we get some nice rainy days soon so I can get some mags scanned it.

Heres the pics to prove it!


The Scanner
scanner.jpg

Demonstrating the Searchability.
searchable.jpg

A view of all the pages.
bunchofpages.jpg
 
Hey, that's neat! I can see using something like that to reduce a whole stack of magazines to one hard disk, or a few DVDs.

Gotta be a real space saver. What's the cost for something like that? Also, how big is the PDF file generater, per magazine?

I'm envious!
 
Well, It is a tad expensive, but both my wife and I suffer from a bit of paperwork OCD, so we figured it'd be a good way to reduce a lot of the paper clutter (AND as a bonus I can archive my magazines).

The scanner was 400$.

I haven't used it much yet, but it looks like the quality I like burns up about 1 meg per page. I could probably cut that down some more, if I was willing to give up some quality.

I figure Disk space is pretty cheap, and if I need to, I can burn Dvd's...

It's very easy to use though. It's not a 'general purpose' scanner, as anything you want scanned has to be able to be fed through the sheet feeder. And it only works with the fujitsu software. I've got an old flatbed that I can use for other things, and those are pretty cheap.

All I can say is wow is it fast and it sure is cool.

Now I need to get one of those heavy duty guillotine paper cutters and start cutting up my magazines to scan....
 
Ok, Just scanned Issu 188 of WOOD Magazine.

84 megs for 96 pages. Took less than 10 minutes to scan and do the OCR.

Sweet.....
 
I've done 5 magazines so far. Cut the spines off, scanned, and threw them away.

It's a strange feeling to throw away a magazine. The OCD part of me feels stress. The normal human feels freedom....
 
Wow Brent, thats a real neat piece of technology. Could you post an attachement that is a full page for us to see the quality on the edges. I noticed in the thumbnail view of all the pages of the first one you did that some of the edges seemed croped or faded. Was this just a function of curling at the edge from the original fold? If so can you still read aspects of the articles that are at that edge?
I too am a packrat when it comes to paper. I would love to get something like this for my office. I build up files and files of documents from clients and this would be a real help to file and sort.

Does the software have any interfaces to things like MS office? specifically word.

Thanks for the report I have not seen something that good for a long time in technology sector.
 
Here's a sample PDF of the first four pages of Issue 180 of WoodSmith.

test.pdf

You can definitely tell that the file has been scanned. There might be wrinkles in the paper, maybe the original had some printing issues. Sometimes the page may not go through 100% vertically, or maybe the operator did a poor job of cutting down the middle :rolleyes:

But to my eye, it's just fine. Printed out it looks just fine as well.

Oh, make sure to try searching it from your PDF viewer.

I don't really know what I was expecting. So often it seems like you can shell out some money on some device or tool that doesn't quite live up to your expectations. So I was prepared for this thing to be a pain to work with.

In fact, it's been quite the opposite. This thing really doesn't have very many buttons or bells or whistles. There are some setting you have to figure out, but really not that many.

To scan a magazine, I just remove the staples, cut it down the middle, set it in the machine and hit a green button on the scanner. It then gets scanned and placed into a pdf file named for the date and time that it was scanned. From there I can review it to make sure it looks ok, rename it, and set it up to be converted to a searchable PDF in the background overnight.

I think I'll make up a zero clearance jig for my table saw to help despine the magazines with as clean an edge as possible. I'm envisioning some sort of clamping device with a board riding on top. Should be easy enough to put together.
 
Wow again Brent. This thing is a winner. The search feature really makes it something else. Only realised that when i saved the test file and then searched in Adobe. Thanks for the file sample and all your posts on this. If you think about it once you are up todate with backups then 2 or tree magazined every 3 months is nothing to keep it up. I bet then the ability to use the mags will be enhanced 100 fold and when you do find what you are looking for you can print or share it as easy as pie.:thumb:
 
cuttin

hey brent, find your self a printer near you ..they will have a paper trimmer that will make short work of those mags.. if i were close i would offer but i am bit to far away..
 
I've seen some pretty hefty paper trimmers on ebay that can cut up to 400 sheets at a time, with a straight up and down guillotine, but it's one of those things that I'm thinking I can do without.

I cut a few spines off using the band saw and that worked out ok, so I'm thinking if I rig up the right kind of jig, I can make short work of them on the ole table saw.

But I would like to get one of them fancy finger choppers!

Thanks for the offer!
 
I reduced an overwhelming stack of bills and papers that was sitting on my desk waiting to be dealt with into a bunch of 1's and 0's.....

What's cool about the 1's and 0's is they hardly take up any space at all...

My paper paradigm is shifting. As long as I have a good backup, I'm thinking this is the way to go. Scan, Pay, Shred, Repeat.
 
New addition

Well, Debinding was proving to be not much fun, so good ole Ebay to the rescue.

Got a guillotine type paper cutter that can slice through 400 sheets for 120 bucks, and free delivery.

It has a gauge you can set for the size of the cut, and a clamp that cranks down on paper to hold it in place. For the number of sheets I'm working with, typically around 50, it takes no pressure and just a slight 'snick' and the binding has been removed....

Now, just to stack up the magazines and to start working my way through them....

papercutter.jpg
 
I figured it was actually easier to just do the whole magazines, rather than comb through each one for just the articles I wanted.

Disk space is pretty cheap, and I can always dump them to a dvd...:thumb:
 
It does a pretty darn good job, but I've found that it works best if I manually put 5 pages or so in and then start the scanning. Then while it does it's job, I start putting the pages in individually as fast as I can. If I just put a whole stack in at one time, it tends to pull more than one page through at a time.

Seems to be a bigger issue with the lightweight glossy magazine pages.

So far, I've probaby got a 50 or so magazines in, and several hundred to go.

The upside is that I get to look at them as I feed them through, and if there are specific articles I like, I'll pull them out and staple them and set them aside before throwing the rest away.

I did clear off my magazine shelves in the garage and reclaimed that space.

For the first time in months I was able to stand in my garage and look at it with inspiration instead of cluttered despair....
 
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