Typically scanners are very boring.  Put the image in, hit pre-scan, crop, scan again and save.  Yawn.  I honestly never thought I would be excited to write a review of any scanner, but the Fujitsu ScanSnap line is nothing short of amazing.  I’ll be the first to say that it’s not for everyone, but the Fujitsu S500 is a fantastic scanner that most should at least look at.

Most people think of scanners as flatbeds, myself included.  Fujitsu took a different approach and created a sheet fed box.  If you have to scan a lot of books or magazines then the ScanSnap is not going to work for you.  If you have a lot of paperwork, business cards, photos or anything flat that you need to scan then the S500 is perfect.  Simply place the paper in the sheet feeder, hit the big green button, and seconds later you have a full-duplexed PDF copy of your original document.

To put this into perspective, the HP scanner I have takes about 3 minutes to pre-scan then actually scan a 6x4 photo.  Not too bad.  The Fujitsu scanner took 14 seconds, and that a scan of both sides.  The Fujitsu not only loaded much faster, but it looked better too.  I would hope so since the HP scanner I have is $99.00 and the Fujitsu is about $450.00. 

There are a lot of great features such as a business card reader, direct to PDF scanning, auto-image rotation and deletion, OCR and a PDF manager to help keep all the scanned files organized.  If you do a lot of day-to-day document scanning, then this is clearly the box for you!