The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M is a document scanner designed for fast scanning (with optional character recognition) of documents. The scanner will scan both sides of a document in one pass.
The scanner comes with two applications that work together:
- ScanSnap Manager, which is the driver for the ScanSnap scanner and provides the basic interface for scanning documents
- ABBYY FineReader, which performs OCR recognition on scanned documents
Setup:The scanner has four Image Quality settings and five compression settings. I experimented with the four Image Quality settings with compression set right in the middle (Normal):
| Image Quality |
File Size |
Comments |
| Normal |
197 KB |
• Text look like a poor (but not unreasonably poor) photo copy
• Text was slightly darker and thicker than the original (almost looked Bold)
• You could see the "pixel dots" along edges of text |
| Better |
270 KB |
• At first hard to tell from Normal, but on closer examination, the text was sharper |
| Best |
504 KB |
• Very nice output when print, still a little thicker and darker than original
• Smooth text edges |
| Excellent |
1.5 MB |
• Slight improvement over Best
• Its hard to describe: if you compare Best and Excellent next to each other; or compare the original to Best, and then the original to Excellent, you don't really see a difference between Best and Excellent. But if you look at all three at the same time: original, Best, Excellent, the Excellent copy does in fact look better |
The above points were in reference to printing out the scanned documents. For viewing the scanned documents on-screen, you won't have the same ability to discern differences:
- You can't really discern Normal and Better on-screen
- Best is a big improvement when viewing on-screen
- There is the slightest bit of improvement between Best and Excellent when viewing on-screen
The hardware has a simple "Scan" button on the front. When you initiate a scan, a dialog box pops up asking if you want to:
- Scan to Folder
- Scan to Email
- Scan to Print
- Scan to iPhoto
- Scan to Searchable PDF
You can also set a default behavior so that it automatically does the process you prefer, eliminating the dialog box. You can set the default folder for scanned documents to be saved to, as well as default naming conventions (the Default is a Date/Time stamp). You can also create custom profiles that save your commonly used settings.
Scanning to Searchable PDF/OCR Processing:
If you choose the "Scan to Searchable PDF" option, it scans the file like normal, and then launches the ABBYY application and the OCR process is performed. The OCR process takes a little less than minute for a two-sided document. When using OCR, two files end up being saved, one without the OCR processing and one with the OCR data with the text "processed by FineReader" added to the second file's name.
Note that if you use the Scan to Searchable PDF option, The FineReader scanning software has its own Image Quality setting. There are three options available:
- Low (for web)
- Medium (for screen)
- High (for print)
What appears to be happening with the OCR process is:
- The document is scanned by the ScanSnap Manager software, with an Image Quality that you set
- ScanSnap Manager saves the file, and its size is determined by the Image Quality set in ScanSnap Manager
- That file is then opened and processed by FineReader, and scanned again based on the Image Quality setting you have set in FineReader
- A second file is then saved with the OCR data, and its size is determined by the Image Quality set in FineReader
- If you have the FineReader software set to delete the original file, it will delete the file created by the first ScanSnap Manager scan
The file size of the test document used by ScanSnap manager in the table above result in files approximately 980 KB in size. It should be noted that this is irregardless of the setting used in ScanSnap Manager. For example:
- if ScanSnap Manager is set to Normal, and creates a 197 KB file, and FineReader is set to High, the resulting file is 979 KB
- if ScanSnap Manager is set to Excellent, and creates a 1.5 MB file, and FineReader is set to High, the resulting file is 991 KB.
Also, the difference in quality of the resulting FineReader document (set at High) based on the image quality of the original ScanSnap Manager Image Quality setting was hard to discern both on the screen and in print, although the files that started as ScanSnap Manager settings of Best/Excellent were better than those that started at Normal/Best.
Future Articles will cover:
- Batch scanning
- Batch OCR processing
- Method for eliminating the non-OCR versions
- Profiles
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