Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i review

The ScanSnap S1300i is a relatively minor update to Fujitsu’s impressive S1300 document scanner, with the chief differences being a refreshed software bundle and quicker scan speeds, up from eight pages per minute (ppm) to 12ppm.

The S1300i seems quite rugged. Its lid clips closed, but opening it turns the scanner on and creates a robust 10-page automatic document feeder (ADF) with adjustable paper guides. Unlike bigger desktop document scanners there’s no output tray so it can be a challenge to preserve the order and tidiness of longer documents as they pass through the device.

Fujitsu supplies the S1300i with a comprehensive and useful software bundle that includes bespoke scan management software and optical character recognition (OCR). It also has plug-ins to support Microsoft SharePoint and the cloud storage services Evernote, Dropbox and SugarSync.

The scanner itself has just a single scan function button to the right of the paper feed. When a job has finished, ScanSnap Manager prompts you to choose what you want to do with the scanned image, with the available options ranging from a straightforward save to disk to emailing and printing.

By default, documents are scanned on both sides, automatically rotated to match the orientation of any text, and any blank sides are suppressed. It’s possible to change the settings by opening the ScanSnap icon in Windows’ Notification Area, but the options are spread over several tabs and could be easier to follow. For example, it’s only possible to select JPEG image files on the File option tab if you first select the Scanning tab and change from automatic colour detection to colour mode.

It’s worth noting that Fujitsu doesn’t provide a TWAIN or ISIS driver, so you can’t capture images directly from within an image-editing program as you can with most other scanners.

The S1300i is quite fast. We captured a single side of A4 in just six seconds at 150 dots per inch (dpi), while it took only a minute and five seconds to capture and process 16 sides from 10 A4 pages. The image quality was ample for office applications, and OCR seemed very accurate. It even did a decent job of capturing photos at 600dpi, although it was rather slow; 10 prints took just over six minutes.

Overall, this is a great choice for mobile workers or anyone else who needs to capture documents quickly in the minimum of space. While it’s easy to use, however, we marginally prefer the software supplied with the Canon ImageFormula P-215. The latter also comes with TWAIN drivers, so it remains our choice in this class.