I have ten years of old paperwork that I really need to keep for a future project. It's probably seven or eight small boxes ... wondering if a sheet fed scanner might be of assistance.

Is there a decent one which isn't $400 and works well with OSX? One that would produce PDFs would be great.

I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap on eBay for $225 - works great, well worth it.

Second the ScanSnap; I have the S300M (the smaller/portable model) and it's a daily lifesaver for work & personal filing and emailing.

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(BTW, it's spelled < y'all >.)

I have a Brother MFC- something model, it does a good job with scanning to PDFs, only downside for me is that it doesn't to both sides so I have to flip the stack after scanning the front sides and then scan the backs. Then use an app called moonwalk to reverse the order of the pages and then automator to combine the pages into one PDF. It works well, but not having to complete these extra steps would be nice. Still it works as a great networked laser printer / scanner and is also a fax machine.

EDIT: it also has an OCR program but on the few pages I tried it with, the results were disappointing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2011 06:00PM by mikebw.

I recently got a Canon MP560 which is an AIO, and the scanning function works really well, the software even does OCR and you can easily search PDFs. However, it is not sheetfed like you ask. But, there are several models of Canon AOI, like MX860 (discontinued) and MX870 (current) that have ADF (automatic document feeder) which takes like 35 pages, does DUPLEX scanning, and I believe also OCR (assuming the software is the same like on my MP560)

maybe the PIXMA MX870 is a better compromise, and in a pinch, you cna also print a photo or some color charts.

If someone has a MX870 and has used the ADF for duplex scanning, please let us know how it works.

Thanks

I have the older Canon MP830 that does sheet feed duplex scanning and also the Scansnap s300m. The Fujitsu software is better and it duplex scans in one pass. The MP830 scans one side, then sucks it back in to scan the other side, so it's slower.

another scansnap vote ... it really does the trick and worth it even if you pay $400

Scansnap it is. It's well worth the money, if time is money.

Quote
Zoidberg
Second the ScanSnap; I have the S300M (the smaller/portable model) and it's a daily lifesaver for work & personal filing and emailing.

To add to my earlier post; my first experience with the Scansnap was an eBay purchase -- it was less than stellar, as the unit must have been heavily utilized; the rollers were just not working right after about a half a year of regular use. I replaced it with a new S300M about three or four years back and it's never had a problem.

Scans both sides at once, something the AIO/MFC units don't do (at least I don't think any of them do; none of the ones I've had did/do, though I know some do scan/repull/scan), and that will save you an immense amount of time. Ditto re/the ability to scan various page sizes (though depending on your noted project that might not be as much of an issue).

Nosing around on Amazon a bit, I found the ScanSnap S1300, $260, which works with Mac and Windows. FWIW, I bought the S300M on sale (J&R I think) years back; I didn't get pulled into the "M" suffix needing to be there for it to work with a Mac. It's USB, it all works fine. I think it came bundled with a special edition of Acrobat (I already owned Acrobat Pro); it should work fine with Preview (or any other PDF capable program, like PDFpen or the like).

The advantage of going with the larger S1500 or fi-6130 is scan speed (the S1500 and S300 are 8 double-sided pages a minute (which is 16 images); the big boys go 18 to 20 ppm) and ADF capacity (the smaller are about a dozen pages, the big ones can hold about 50 pages). All are top-notch.

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(BTW, it's spelled < y'all >.)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2011 06:52PM by Zoidberg.

Go with the ScanSnap and sell the version of Acrobat that comes with it as you don't really need it. Preview should be able to do everything that you want.