The Fujitsu's ScanSnap Challenge - Week 1

I was recently contacted to see if I would like to try out one of Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanners and take part in a couple of scanning challenges. I said yes because I liked the sound of having a few challenges and well, I like gadgets!

I find having a scanner at home really handy and have used my current one a lot - I recently scanned in a ton of old family photos to make copies to hang on the wall however the scanner I have is about 10 years old and a is huge, cumbersome, flatbed scanner. It works fine, most of the time - it can be a bit glitchy with software, but it's so big I have nowhere to keep it.  For this reason, when asked which scanner I wanted to try, I chose the ScanSnap S1300 Compact Scanner.

The key features of the scanner are that it is ideal for mobile and stationary use, you can scan to a folder, email, scan to print or convert to Microsoft Word and Excel and apparently you can scan to your iPad/iPhone and popular Cloud services although I've not tried those features!  One of the main reasons I selected this scanner was the fact that it was compatible for both Mac and PC, in fact the biggest win for me was the fact that the software was Mac-compatible, as quite often I find that this isn't always the case.

So, the challenge?

Week 1: Ease of scanning-to-process

Get your child to draw a colourful picture of their favourite cartoon character and review the ease of using the ScanSnap to upload the picture to your PC/laptop.

I'm going to start at the beginning.

Well you don't really expect me to put something technical together without the aid of wine do you? Although in hindsight the wine was probably more of a hindrance than a help... The setting up process was easy. There was a quick start sheet and a more detailed book. The quick start was more than enough help to get it all connected up.  The first thing you do is install the software, then connect all the various leads. Then you stare at it for about 5 minutes wondering why a) no light comes on the scanner and b) why the menu hasn't come up on your laptop screen before going back to the book and reading the part you skipped over.

Ta- da! A working scanner.  Now to commence the actual challenge. 

The first thing I had to do was get my daughter to draw a picture, as below. (We'll ignore the bad spelling shall we?)

I then popped the piece of paper into the scanner (face down) and pressed the magical blue button and voila, the paper started feeding through. Once it had completed, a menu popped up on the screen which gave me the option to save it to a folder, print it, email it and so on. 

I chose to save it to a folder (you can choose which folder and where) and that was it, it was saved to my chosen folder as a PDF. The whole process took literally a minute which is way faster than the scanner I have been using.

That there is the scanned version of "Flownder".

The scanning process was very quick and easy and the output was really good. I was rather impressed, and I think my husband was too as I didn't need to ask him for help once. 

Don't forget to come back next week to see Challenge No 2.  And just in case you were wondering, this is what we were aiming for;

Flounder, from The Little Mermaid.

Thank you to Fujitsu for providing the scanner for this challenge and review.