Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 review

Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1300 is a very compact document scanner that be used to easily digitise multi-page documents in the office or on the move. It’s a duplex sheet feed scanner, capable of scanning both sides of 10 colour pages of A4 in about a minute.

Designed primarily for travelling business users, the S1300 can be either powered from the mains or over USB and is small enough to throw into a backpack. It can take 10 sheets of 80gsm A4 at a time as well as smaller sizes such as A5, business cards or 6x4in photos. However, sheet feed scanners can potentially damage photos as they go through the scanner’s rollers, so be careful.

The S1300 is simple to set up. All we had to do was install the ScanSnap driver, slide a page into the scanner and press the button marked ‘scan’. Less than twenty seconds later, both sides had been scanned and saved. The ScanSnap driver makes it easy to apply different settings to your scans. You can choose between 150dpi, 300dpi and 600dpi scan resolutions, duplex (two-sided) or simplex (single-sided) scanning, in black and white or colour.

Scan speeds were quick – an A4 page took 11 seconds to scan at 150dpi and 15 seconds at 300dpi, while a 6x4in photo at 600dpi took 28 seconds. The ScanSnap driver software can automatically carry out Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to transform scanned documents into a text file or searchable PDF. This is time-consuming, though; a one-page searchable PDF took 31 seconds to scan and create.

At 150dpi, our scanned 10pt text was legible at full magnification, but a little fuzzy if we zoomed in further. 300dpi scanning takes four more seconds for each page but is well worth it if you need sharp detail. We were pleased with the results of our 600dpi photo scan, which captured all the colour and detail of the original without damaging it in the process.

The driver is very easy to use. Scans are made according to your settings, and you’re then given the option of saving in various formats, such as JPEG or TIFF image files or PDFs, or as a text document. Alternatively, you send your image or document directly to Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint, attach it to an email, send it to your printer, or add it to the supplied CardMinder business card indexing suite. Unfortunately, the scanner uses closed proprietary drivers. No TWAIN, WIA or ISIS drivers are available for the S1300, so you won’t be able to scan directly to programs such as Photoshop Elements.

The S1300 is a great portable scanner. Scans are fast and high quality, and we particularly liked the ability to create searchable PDFs. Although expensive, it’s still cheaper than most multi-page sheet feed scanners and is a great choice if you need to archive documents on the move. Although its drivers are restrictive, they’re very well designed and should fulfil the requirements of most small business users.