Ask a few attorneys about moving to a paperless office and soon enough you’ll get the sense that they all own Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, like the S510M or S1500M. The ScanSnap models have become the machine of choice because of their ease-of-use, reliability and speed. Recently, I got the opportunity to test out their newest model the S1100.

The S1100 is an ultra-portable version of the ScanSnap and I’ve included a picture here. The unit is powered by a USB-to-miniUSB cable from your computer. The idea being – you don’t need to plug in for power. Of course, if you run out of power on your computer battery…well, tough luck.

The main competition for the S1100 seems to be the Neat Receipts scanner, a scanner from Doxie, and Fujitsu’s own S1300.

It’s been Fujitsu’s habit to make Mac-specific scanners in a nice shade of white. The S1100 does not have the “M” designation for Mac, so it comes in “sleek black.” But, honestly, I don’t think that matters much these days. Macbook Pros (and Macbook Airs) are made out of aluminum – so the whole “white” movement seems a bit played.

I auditioned the S1100 on a professional development conference where everyone brings copies of handouts for all the other attendees. There is some trading (like in elementary school with your peanut butter & fluff sandwich) and you end up coming home with a stack of paper. My goal was to leave the paper behind and come home with just scanned versions of everything in my Quest To Travel Light.  (See, for example, my review of the Ristretto for iPad.)

For those of you who read the last page of a novel first, here’s the summary: I succeeded, sort of.

As you might expect, this scanner is an exercise in compromise: Size and Portability vs. Functionality and Speed.

I’m not someone who is big on technical specs, though the promotional materials say that this scanner runs at about 7 seconds per page. My experience is that the scanner is surprisingly “peppy.” That is, I expected it to run slower than it did, but it moves the pages along at a good clip and it doesn’t seem like the scanner is “thinking” too much. I’ve used other “portable” scanners and it always seems like I’m begging the device to run the whole page through the scanner. The S1100 is anything but pokey, which is great because it makes you want to keep using it. If the scanner was too slow, then it would feel like a real chore to scan anything but one or two pages.

One of the compromises in functionality is that it only scans one side at a time and if you want to scan both sides of a page, you have to manually feed the page on the other side. This presents a problem because you can’t drop a stack of 7-10 pages on the “feeder” and wait for them to go through. I would have preferred to be able to set the scanner to scan all of the first pages on one pass, and then flip them over and scan the second page.

This device comes with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Manager, which allows you to set the compression levels, scan in color, and create a few different profiles. For a great tutorial on how to use ScanSnap Manager and profiles, check out this post from my buddy, Finis Price. One problem I’ve had with the ScanSnap software generally is in the way you can, or can’t, customize your file naming convention. Fujitsu includes a choice to do YYYY_MM_DD etc – all the way down to minutes and seconds. That’s a little too granular for me, but if I could just have it name by year, month, day and then a 3-digit serial number – that would be awesome. However, I can’t get it to do that, so I have to name each file separately, which is a real pain.

Other than that, I think the software is pretty good. You can scan directly to Word, Excel, Google Docs or Evernote (as either a PDF or JPG file). You can also scan directly to a folder, as you might expect, or to an Email. There’s also an option to OCR or keyword tag files as they are scanned – however, this really slows down the scanning speed. All of these scanning options make it really easy to use scanned copies of files in lots of different applications.

Obviously, the idea is that this is a “portable” scanner so you deserve to hear how portable it is. The S1100 reminds me of a 1×1 piece of kindling that’s just over 11 inches long/wide. It’s a mini block that I drop into the bottom of my bag for travel. I like that there’s just one cable to bring with you, but in my tryout, I found the mini-USB cable a little difficult to situate in the S1100.

One other annoyance was the fact that the “output” cover, made of plastic, tends to open with the slightest bit of pressure. The problem with that is that I’d find the cover open when I took the scanner out of my bag. It made me think that a carrying case, which Fujitsu sells (but which I did not review), is necessary for travel.

In retrospect, the only reason I didn’t think I succeed in my Quest To Travel Light was because most of the handouts were double-sided. I didn’t expect the scanner to scan both pages at once, but I also didn’t expect to have to hand-feed every double-sided sheet of paper to get both sides. I suppose I could have scanned them all on one side and rearranged the pages after I scanned them, but that seems like a lot of extra work. I would like to see them come out with a software update that lets you run a stack of papers and then just flip them over.

I think the S1300 is the competitor that comes closes to handling my objections, but at a major compromise of its own. The S1300 handles double sided documents, and seems to be a more solid machine – but at nearly triple the size. That completely destroys the portability advantage of carrying a scanner with you.

The NeatReceipts and Doxie scanners solve the problem of the opening piece of plastic, but they run nearly twice as slow – a dealbreaker in my book.

Overall, my minor quibbles aside, I think this is another quality product from Fujitsu and, at $199, a good value for a travel scanner. The NeatReceipts and the Doxie scanner are nearly as much money ($199 and $149, respectively), but I think the speed advantage alone makes the S1100 the better choice.

If you have a huge briefcase and lift weights, you might do better with a S1300, but I don’t think they are supposed to be compared in the same category. I would like to see how the device holds up, however, being used with a carrying case and not loose in my bag. I’ll continue to carry it with me to conferences where I don’t want to bring home paper in my Quest To Travel Light.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 is *Recommended*

Posted by Victor Medina

*Disclaimer: I asked Fujitsu to send me one of these so I could test it for the conference I discussed above. They did so without charging me for it and without indicating that they want the scanner back. Decide for yourself whether my review has been tainted by the fact that I didn’t pay for the scanner. Then again, I have two other ScanSnaps in my office that I paid for…I’m sure that figures into the equation one way or another.*