The ScanSnap S510M Scanner is awesome. In one night of use, I managed to clear most of the documents off my desk that had accumulated over the months and, shamefully, even years! The scanner comes bundled with Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager, Cardiris 3, ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap and Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. It also comes with all the necessary cables (i.e., power and USB) as well as a carrier sheet for problematic documents. Basically, the carrier sheet is two transparent pages that may be used for torn or other damaged documents that may jam the automatic document feeder.

Assembling the scanner was a snap. Next, I installed the ScanSnap and ABBYY FineReader software. I already have Acrobat installed and I don’t have an immediate need to scan business cards. With that completed, I place a document on the feeder, tap the scan button on the scanner, and the scanner scans the document. The ScanSnap application then prompts me on how I would like to process the image. The choices are Scan2Folder, Scan2E-mail, Scan2Print, iPhoto and ABBYY Scan2PDF. I’ve only used Scan2Folder and ABBYY Scan2PDF. The difference is that ABBYY Scan2PDF will OCR the scan and make it searchable. Scan2Folder just saves the scan as an image inside a PDF file without performing any text recognition. I didn’t see any option for scanning to Adobe Acrobat. However, when I checked the “Do not show this menu again” box in the ScanSnap Quick Menu, the scans defaulted to Adobe Acrobat.

If you want all your documents to be searchable, then running them through ABBYY or Adobe Acrobat makes sense. However, character recognition takes time. So, at first, I routed a few documents through ABBYY FineReader. However, in the end, I used Scan2Folder because the OCR was taking too long and I had too many documents to process.

Speed. The ScanSnap S510M is an extremely fast scanner. It also scans in duplex in one pass; i.e., it can scan both sides of a sheet of paper at once. Simply amazing.

Settings. If you right-click or control-click on the ScanSnap Manager icon in the dock and select Settings, you can change the default save folder for the files. You also would want to change the Paper Size setting by clicking on the “Scan mixed paper size” box. This allows you to place a stack of different sized papers into the feeder and have them all come out as one document. Not sure why this setting is not the default.

Auto Straighten. Don’t worry if your document wasn’t feed in perfectly straight. I ran a receipt through the scanner that got pulled through slightly askew and the software straightened it out without any user intervention.

Quite simply and absolutely amazing product. If you use a PC instead of a Mac, the PC version of the product is Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

Usually, Amazon.com will tell you about available rebates at the time of purchase. In this case, I had to find the info on the Fujitsu website myself. The current Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M rebates include a $50 mail-in rebate and a free copy of Readiris Pro.