Fujitsu Scansnap ix500 Small Business Scanner
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,735 words · ~8 min read
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this video will blow your mind drop your
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jaw and move your
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bowels okay so maybe I oversold it a little bit this video is of the Fujitsu
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scans snap 500 and it actually exists
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not because I think this is the most exciting product in the world but rather
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because we needed one for the office it's just a handy thing we use and you
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lot told me I'm supposed to make videos about that kind of stuff so here we go
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with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts we actually have
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a network scanner already one that was a lot cheaper but our business is growing
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and our needs are changing so between walking back and forth only being able
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to scan directly to two PCS maximum it's lack of double-sided scanning and it's
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an ability to handle oddside paper without resorting to the flatbed we
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wanted something faster and more flexible so in the Box for the 500 we
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find a usb3 cable Fujitsu software Adobe
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Acrobat 11 standard a carrier sheet more on that later and the scanner itself
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resplendant in an improved black finish that makes it not look straight out of
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the 90s like the S500 that I overviewed last time around on ncx Tech tips
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software setup is also improved from last time it's much faster to install
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but one big issue that remains is that if you don't want to use the included CD
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you have to jump through a bunch of Hoops to download the handy management
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utilities I really wish Fujitsu would come up with a different way of doing
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this physically Fujitsu is going for a
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so easy it only requires a one button approach here so you unfold it from its
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compact storage mode and you'll find well just one button on the front
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labeled scan on the back it's got a Kensington lock a power jack a usb3 port
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a Wi-Fi toggle switch and a WPS button for easily adding it your network
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wirelessly to scan to multiple PCS or
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smartphones running iOS or Android but that's about it so the make or break
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feature of this scanner is going to be how well the software works so let's
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move on it took me a while to get used to this one button concept and the
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different ways that you can use it so first up you can have the software
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create a scans snap folder on your computer that temporarily hold stuff so
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you can email it out or archive it from there and then that folder will just
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automat magically clean everything up after a set number of days that's good
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for certain types of work like administrative work but the way that I
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like to use it better is to have it look for whatever device or window is active
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then Target that with the scaned file so if card minder their business card
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manager is up on my screen it'll it'll go to there if organizer their scan
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document organizer is up it goes to there and if nothing's up this one's
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great you press scan it scans to the computer then prompts you with a whole
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bunch of different options for what it can do with it some of them are useful like Dropbox and Google doc scanning
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While others are unfortunately less useful with the email option being down
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to Outlook expressed by default in Windows 7 and up and thirdparty add-ons
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to change to Gmail the one I tried being aixa being imperfect at best but the
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good news is you can configure whichever ones you want to appear and leave the
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others speaking of configuration options all the usual ones are there so DPI
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settings go from normal to better to best to excellent
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I mean really uh you can pick color or black and white single or double-sided
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you can automatically remove blank pages prompt for more pages when you're done
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scanning or not and then we start to get into some of the more exotic stuff it
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can use ultrasonic scanning to detect an accidental double page in the Auto
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Theater it can autor rotate your finished documents to keep everything
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easy to read once it's scanned and there's even an option to convert
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everything to searchable PDFs with the included acrobat software so then you
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can use the organizer to search for any relev scan documents very easily in
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theory most of these features work really well but in practice they're not
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perfect I mean on A4 paper auto rotate
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I'd say is 95 plus% accurate but with things like business cards and receipts
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that's probably closer to 75% the text
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detection for business cards and searchable PDFs is also a little bit hit
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or miss with documents I found that searching for stuff off the top of my
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head usually yielded the thing that I was looking for but the mode that lets
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you highlight text and then apply those keywords to documents didn't work that
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well for me and business cards were all over the place whenever they're oriented
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Wrong by the software text detection it doesn't actually pick up any of the
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pertinent information and organize it correctly at all and even when they are
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oriented correctly it missed a lot of stuff I mean to be fair the speed and
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image quality are good and business cards don't follow very standard
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formatting but I still don't think that's an excuse for not tracking down
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basic stuff like the phone number one high point here though is that the card
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minder application once you've entered all of the missing data and cleaned
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things up a little bit is really great you can just press a quick hotkey and
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bring up business cards extremely quickly it's a lot better than having
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Stacks like this just lying around like I have in the past so since we're on the
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subject of good stuff the document feeder is really great I didn't need the
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included carrier sheet which flattens out and protects fragile documents at
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all it does a great job with slightly ripped or even crinkled paper and on the
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other end of the spectrum I accidentally put in my Star Citizen card a plastic
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card in it when I was scanning business cards and if I hadn't been constantly
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refilling the hopper to do more business cards in one batch without stopping it
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probably wouldn't have even gotten stuck in the output try and jammed but even
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then the scan ended up looking fine I was able to pull it out and I was able
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to keep going just like that the one thing I was able to deed it with fairly
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often was very very small receipts like
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taxi receipts or weird shaped business
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cards other than that I was really impressed by the document feeder and the
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impressed keeps coming last time around the mobile app experience was terrible I
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couldn't even get it working this time it pretty much couldn't have been better
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remember that bit about just scanning at
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whatever is open when you press the button after a short simple Setup Wizard
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you can get docs on your phone in two ways you can load a document then Press
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scan in the app on your phone and boity Presto it's on your pH phone or you can
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use the quick menu to scan it to the PC like normal then press mobile when the
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menu pops up it'll wait for you to launch the app on your phone then push
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it to you over Wi-Fi in a couple of seconds without you even interacting with the app on your phone then if you
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want to go back to PC scanning mode when you're done you just close or even
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minimize the app on your phone and everything is back to normal within about a second very cool it completely
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changes the way we scan things around our office because usually we just need
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something temporarily to email an NDA to someone or something like that and now
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anyone with the password can scan something directly to their phone by
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just walking over to the scanner pressing scan on their phone and boom
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done five stars right there but of course all of this comes at a cost the
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is500 is super expensive especially given that scanners have been commodity
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items for like 10 years that makes it a really tough sell for the average user
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but with features like quick paper jam removal
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user replaceable parts for a longer Lifetime and a pretty amazing community
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building new mods and features all the time for a business user even a smallish
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one it's basically a no-brainer I mean check out this little hack to use the
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highlighting keyword feature to automatically censor names on a legal
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document how much manual Crossing out would that save pretty cool anyway guys
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let me know if you care about us talking about stuff in the future that we're
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using on the business side of things or if you'd prefer that we stick to Consumer grade stuff I really do
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yeah okay cool all right that's it guys thanks for watching and as always don't
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