Here’s a conundrum for USB experts… I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500. This is a truly awesome device for slimming down one’s file cabinet. However, for the past year or so it wreaks havoc on the rest of my USB life. I thought it might be my feeble 4.5-year-old desktop but the behavior is even worse with the latest custom-built PC. With the old PC, powering up the scanner (connected via USB 2.0) would disable any USB devices connected via a hub. I replaced the hub with a (powered) plugable 3.0 hub. Same issues. Unplugging the scanner restored normal USB behavior for both hub-connected and directly connected devices.
With the new PC the scanner can coexist happily with the direct-to-the-motherboard ports, as before. But connecting the powered scanner actually seems to have destroyed the plugable hub. Even with the scanner unpowered and unplugged, there is no way to use a USB device connected through the hub and the LED lights on the front of the hub to show connectivity will not illuminate.
I haven’t tried the scanner with a different USB cable so I am not sure if this is simply a cable issue. Could the scanner be establishing its own ground for the USB and draining crazy amounts of power out of the hub back into the PC and from there up into the scanner?
[If the answer is “throw out your 5-year-old scanner” then that leaves the question of whether to buy the WiFi replacement (ScanSnap iX500
Sorry I can’t help your USB question, but how long does the entire process of scanning a double-sided page take? Do you also OCR, or just save as images?
Stand alone scanners are ridiculously overpriced compared to multifunction printers. I got a Samsung multifunction (a high end one) with a duplex scanner for next to nothing because they expect you to buy lots of expensive toner cartridges later.
Kourt: It scans both sides simultaneously so you get the full 20 pages per minute that Fujitsu specs (i.e., same speed whether simplex or duplex and it automatically figures out what to do, though if there is a lot of bleed-through you’ll get some pages that you will want to delete from your PDFs). If you’re doing just one page count on about 45 seconds to give the document a file name.
Izzie: How fast is the scanner on that Samsung? My HP multifunction has a “duplex scanner” but it has to pull a page through and then push it back and then pull it through again. It is at least 10X slower than the Fujitsu and incredibly noisy by comparison. On the other hand the HP seems to be more tolerant regarding the condition of the paper.
Thanks Philip; that’s much improved over the old days.
Also OT but relevant to your articles about Israel:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/04/bloomberg_poll_on_republican_support_for_israel_over_america_isn_t_anti.html
I am not familiar with the author’s perspective, but on page 2:
“Thirty-seven percent of Republicans consider Israel one of their top five issues, and most of these people would abandon democracy [in Israel] in order to make sure Israel remains a Jewish-controlled religious state. By a wide margin, this segment of the GOP cares more about Israeli interests than about American interests, human rights, or any other principle.”
An American liking a foreign politician more than a U.S. politician doesn’t mean that the person cares only about a foreign issue (Americans are notoriously uninterested in foreign policy). The foreign politician hasn’t raised taxes on the American, spent tax dollars on a project that the American doesn’t support, etc.
The question “Israel is an important ally, the only democracy in the region, and we should support it even if our interests diverge.” was presumably interpreted in an anodyne fashion by people polled in the same way that one would understand a call to “support our troops even if you don’t support the war on Iraq.”
Ask one of those Republicans if he would give up his pavement-melting SUV and drive a Chevy Volt in order to help Israel (since consuming oil funds countries that are currently at war with Israel). You’d probably get a different percentage…
[Doing the poll in this way and getting the analysis published is kind of noteworthy. It used to be that a standard component of Jew-hatred was asserting that Jews in a country would be disloyal to that country. Now it turns out that both Jews and most Republicans are guilty of putting the interests of Jews ahead of the interests of the U.S. Thus anyone who dislikes Jews must vote for Democrats.]
Personally I am more interested in debugging this USB issue than the country of Israel’s challenges, whatever they may be…
I can’t help with the USB issue (I glanced through my copy of the USB Complete Developers guide but eventually lost consciousness from the complexity of the spec), but I have the IX500 and this thing rips through paper like nothing else.
On Wi-Fi it’s slow, but on USB 3.0 it’s good. In my case I just have it throw everything into the the Evernote walled garden and I’m happy as long as I remember to pay the Evernote Premium yearly tithe.
Mike: Does Evernote OCR everything that comes in? Let you easily export a given document as a PDF? Why is it better than making everything a PDF that is automatically OCRed?
i can’t imagine you’d be satisfied with wifi scanning. Just wire it. Also scan snaps are notorious for usb issues. A friend of mine spent a large chunk of her career selling and supporting these monsters for law firms throughout the Midwest. Sometimes it’s driver issues- apparently with windows 7 especially. Sometimes it’s usb bandwidth. Sometimes it’s a crappy(under) powered hub. It might even be a firmware or power supply issue on the scanner. I asked and she hasn’t encountered this particular issue, but the fact that she could rattle off the possible issues speaks to the state of the scansnap product line.
Canon should have some competitive offerings in this game.
A related question: what is the best way to index all those (OCR’d) pdfs (on either Linux or Windows?)
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=1027608&gclid=CMnJhJn-jcUCFYg8gQodHpoAog&Q=&is=REG&A=details
Should be hard to damage
Yeah, the resulting files in Evernote are PDFs and OCR’d during import. Exporting is just a click and it comes up in the default PDF viewer on the system (in my case on a Mac it’s Preview) where you can do whatever with ’em.
Evernote has some nice sorting features that I hear can be automatically configured, but I just manually sort stuff into appropriate “Notebooks” in Evernote at scan time.
It’s a good setup, but I do worry about the walled-garden aspect and the security of all these documents being sent up to the Evernote cloud.
It’s convenient to have everything backed up and be able to view it all with the Evernote app on my iPhone, but I know enough about operations to know their security probably sucks and all this is probably a bad idea.
But I’m also lazy and it works so there I am.
ScanSnaps are the only viable game in town for Mac users, but on Windows I would give Canons an edge, as they have a somewhat more reliable paper feed mechanism. And yes, I have experience the same issues with my S1500M on my Mac, so I don’t even try and plug it into a hub any more. A surprisingly high proportion of USB hubs are garbage that don’t fully or correctly implement the USB specs, but this issue is Fujitsu-specific it seems.
Most business scanning software has poor usability, and only makes sense in automated workflows where the scanning has to integrate using APIs with business applications, e.g. a healthcare management system or insurance claim processing ERP. You are much better off with consumer-grade hardware and software, as long as they don’t skimp on the OCR engine, i.e. use Nuance or ABBYY OCR engines, not some off-brand system.
My comment was off-topic, raised a potentially inflammatory subject, quoted an author who I don’t necessarily agree with, and failed to state a thesis. I’m very embarrassed by the abysmal quality of my comment and apologize for the distraction.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2477397,00.asp is a review of the big Fujitsu and they say the Epson DS-860 is substantially better for OCR. It is USB 2.0 only, which makes me wonder if the communication can keep up with 130 pages per minute (65 ppm duplex) of image. Reviewers on Amazon of the Epson say that it comes with almost no software (which I guess is okay for me since, not knowing how great Evernote is, I just want to make OCR’d PDFs and put them into Dropbox).
This is the one that I have:
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/printers/SL-M3870FW/XAA
They claim “SCAN SPEED – Up to 24 ipm”. I assume this is on the lowest possible resolution. It does have full duplex on both the scanner and the printer which is nice.
It’s not a small unit – it stands around 19″ high. The footprint is about that also plus you need maybe 6″ clearance at the back so you can lift the lid on the scanner.
I paid less than $200 when it was on sale but it’s back up over $300 – still less than any stand alone scanner.
http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?1413491_g10e
The Samsung does not scan both sides at once. It is definitely going to be slower than a dedicated scanner such as the Epson but for short documents it is not a big difference. If I have a long document I just get it going and leave it so the fact that it is slower is not a big deal to me. YMMV. Usually these stand alone scanners are used by medium sized offices so they seem like overkill for personal use.
It seems to me that a lot of the reviews confuse hardware and software. All of these scanners are able to drive almost any scanning software. Generally I just drive my scanner with Adobe Acrobat. You can set it to automatically OCR after a scan, in which case the PDF becomes searchable, but not editable unless you save it to Word (or another editable format). The OCR is not 100% perfect but it is close enough most of the time. I’ve tried stand alone software such as Omnipage and the results were not significantly better. In fact, it seemed to be trying too hard and you end up with a Word document with lots of strange formatting in it as they try to preserve the exact appearance of the scanned page. Adobe is certainly the gold standard for creating PDFs.
No idea on the USB issues. But the idea that the scanner is killing USB hubs would make me want to replace it.
I use the ScanSnap ix500, which I connect by USB not WiFi. On the Mac it has no issues with remembering the last directory. I simply open the lid and feed the papers. They are scanned to PDFs and OCRed and dumped in a single scan directory where I manually sort them. And on the Mac the search feature makes it almost pointless to bother sorting them manually.
To me the killer feature is the PDF with the Text OCRed under the image (you see the image, but can select the OCRed text). With double sided scanning things couldn’t be simpler. I imagine most of the scanners do this these days, but if not I would look elsewhere.
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/support/computing/peripheral/scanners/ssfaq/s1500_setting2.html
Thanks, Rajeev. As I am using the Fujitsu-supplied cable and connecting directly to the PC it would seem that it should be working, yet in fact it was able to destroy a powered hub that was also connected to the same box.
I have a ScanSanp S1500M which I love. It is connected to a £10 powered hub and from there to an iMac, without any problems.
Scanning to Evernote works well, as does their OCR. Also worth noting that scanning to Google Drive also works well and likewise they OCR for you. I’ve not tried to measure the relative qualities of these OCR systems, but I’m assuming in both cases they’re “pretty much as good as it gets for consumers”, given the companies behind them. Certainly it works well enough for me.
Can’t speak to your USB issues, but if you were to update your scanner to the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500, you would be happy. I have used these (five of them between home and two offices) over the last couple of years to scan about 4000 medical charts and a large number of financial paper records with success. The ix500, which on Amazon is $430-ish, last I checked, with a software bundle, clears stacks of paper smoothly with a fairly smart document manager that sizes up or down to a 8.5×11 document format, scans both sides simultaneously, “repairs” rips and punches (not coffee cup stains), and auto-rotates the images to the “upright” orientation with reasonable accuracy. It has a decent monitor for overlaps and jams and gives you immediate options to save or re-scan the suspect pages without making you re-scan the entire document, something that is helpful when the documents can exceed 100 pages apiece, as some of mine have. The only downside is that these relatively cheap scanners aren’t TWAIN compatible, if you require that option, the way the fi-series from Fujitsu are.
I’ve been using Evernote’s Scannable app on my iPhone to scan things. You just keep putting things in front of it and when it recognizes a rectangle shaped object it snaps a scan of it. Works pretty well actually.