Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Document Scanner

If you need a combination of speed and quality, you will certainly like the ScanSnap S1500, which really does the job of scanning huge amounts of documents quickly. I was less impressed with its ability to handle business cards but overall, this is an excellent document scanner.

This is an excellent document scanner--another in a series of great and very fast document scanners in the ScanSnap line--so let's start off with its few weak points.

That's the way that the built-in optical-character-recognition (OCR) software handles business cards. Sometimes extremely well, sometimes poorly, and most often pretty well but not great. Business cards in foreign languages don't pose the huge dilemma that they do with some other document scanners I've tested, but I was surprised at how many times it stumbled over a period between numbers instead of a dash. Similarly, you'd think that since the fields themselves are often picked up properly that somehow the software would guess that the last three characters of an e-mail address would be "com" rather than "coll." What that means is that while you can have your cards read in a jiffy, you'll still need to check each one and make plenty of corrections.

On the other hand, it is extremely fast, with documents passing through the unit as fast as I could feed them in--and with both sides read at once. And the built-in options are many--you can scan direct to a folder, e-mail, printer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or even SharePoint. That's a lot of built-in convenience, and despite occasional OCR glitches, they all worked smoothly.

The scanner comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard, which helps take a bit of the pain away from the scanner's price, which is over $400.