FujitsuPA03540-B055 fi-6130 Duplex Scanner

After researching my available choices, I purchased this scanner in order to digitize my awfully big collection of magazines. I have a very good paper cutter I purchased on eBay that allows me to cut a half inch off the side of the magazines removing the binding and any of the associated binding glues or staples. Getting this clean cut is necessary to do high volume scan feeds of magazines. I scan everything directly into Adobe Acrobat. I already had Acrobat Pro, but this scanner comes with Acrobat Standard which is all you need to do beautiful, fully rendered high quality color scans into PDF.This Fujitsu scanner has a very small footprint compared to my lumbering Brother multi-function machine which has the ability to do auto-feeds for scanning as well, but don't let the size deceive you because this performs at a much higher level than any cheaper consumer scanner.I looked for an alternative to the Brother because I need to scan about 2000 magazines and with a duplex feeder it would take me years the Brother is that slow. But this Fujitsu is a champ! It scans on both sides of the page at the same time so none of that laborious back feeding you see with a duplex feeder is necessary.It zips through in a few seconds, recognizes both sides in a few seconds and then its on to the next page. It feeds about a dozen color double-sided magazine pages a minute which is 24 pages. A whole magazine therefore feeds in 3-5 minutes. I scan them at 400 DPI which results in crisp color images and very readable text.After it feeds, I let the OCR program run so my text is searchable. This character recognition process is optional, but I consider it very important for my future digital archives which I will be able to then index and search. This OCR process takes three times longer than the actual scanning. Altogether, the scans and then the optical recognition of a 100-128 page color magazine may take 15-20 minutes. With a regular auto-feed scanner, it would take 3 hours and it would not be done as well. When scanning into PDF, remember to use Acrobat's PDF Optimization procedure which condenses the file size of the PDF by 40-70% without any noticeable loss in quality.I am very impressed with the efficiency of this scanner and I am very happy it is enabling me to put two decades worth of archival material into high quality PDFs. I will no longer have to lug 20 boxes of magazines with me when I move. They will all be archived on a few DVDs. I'd say this scanner is worth every penny I paid for it. I did not see anything comparable. If you want to do anything like what I'm doing with PDFs, I'd encourage you to get this scanner. It's a workhorse. In the first two weeks, I've scanned 100 magazines flawlessly.

This is a great scanner. The sheet feeder holds about 75 sheets, and you never have to worry about over-stuffing: it will warn you if there are too many sheets. Staples aren't a real problem either - this thing is tough enough to suck in staples and disfigure your pages, but the staples won't hurt the scanner. Just pop open the case, remove staple, smooth out the pages, and hit retry - scans like a charm.For speed, this is a great. At 300dpi double-sided, I couldn't pull staples from manuscripts fast enough to keep up with this thing. I also had some materials in Arabic to scan - once you go up to 600dpi, it's slow enough that you have to wait a bit. 1200dpi - you may as well go make some coffee while it scans your 50 sheets. But this is all for B&W with no text conversion - once you add in grayscale or color, the scanner slows down significantly. With Adobe Acrobat, I recommend skipping the OCR text recognition completely - you can always OCR the PDF later, and it will take for freakin' ever to finish your scans if it's doing OCR in between each document.Now then, this is a heavy-duty scanner. It took me about an hour to set it up and figure it all out. I'm using Windows 7, and I couldn't get all the Fujitsu programs to load correctly. Doesn't seem to matter - Adobe Acrobat 9 loaded just fine, all the drivers loaded all right, and then I was scanning away. Something to watch out for - after your computer goes to sleep, it might recognize the scanner when it wakes up. Just unplug and replug the USB cable. If Adobe doesn't see the scanner, then go to Scan Documents -> Configure Presets and make sure you've selected the Fujitsu scanner.Once you're good-to-go, you can scan all day. I bought this to archive short stories that have been workshopped for my MFA - at 300dpi B&W, I can read all the text crystal-clear, and all the comments are legible, and I filled up a whole file box with scanned manuscripts with maybe six hours of scanning. (Be careful - if you have several days of scanning, this can become fun and addictive. It's like shredding paper - once you start, you don't want to stop).For smaller print, you'll want 600 or 1200dpi. 900dpi doesn't seem to work for some reason - I guess the scanner isn't set for it. I have some workbooks in Arabic to scan, and Arabic text is smaller 12pt and the dots can easily be blurred (not to mention the workbooks themselves were copies of copies). For the good copies, 600dpi worked fine. For the poor copies, 1200dpi preserved the copy of a copy pretty much perfectly. As in I can still barely read it, but it's no worse than what I had to start with.I don't use the color settings much, but they are amazing. If you scan a yellow legal pad with your handwriting, it's like your soul appears like magic on the computer screen. You should try it - it's really cool. Much cooler than B&W scans, but much slower with much, much larger file sizes.As for file size - you can scan a few hundred B&W 300dpi into about 2MB. Very nice and small. Grayscale or color might push it to 15MB or 30MB, so it's a huge difference. It you're just archiving, B&W is quick, dependable, and readable.That just about does it. Be careful of staples: they won't hurt the scanner, but the scanner will hurt your paper before realizing there's a jam.

The software is not adequate for this fine scannerToo many steps in getting a scan into a usable mode. Not time efficient.