Monday, September 22, 2008

First Impressions? I'm in love!

As with people, when you "meet" a piece of new hardware, those first impressions are important. And I'm very impressed, to the point that I think I am in love with my new ScanSnap S300! Actually, thanks to Denise, I was in love with it before the FedEx guy delivered it late this afternoon! As Denise reported, set up was a breeze. Really. Within half an hour of receiving it I was scanning documents! And creating searchable pdf files. Awesome doesn't even come close to describing this little gem.

After playing with it for an hour or so, I set up some scanning profiles (thank you Brooks), pulled out one of my 3-ring binders and started scanning. You can set it up to create the searchable pdf file as you scan or, as I have done, send the scanned file to the ScanSnap software and let it create the searchable pdf later. If you create the searchable pdf as you scan, the scanning just takes longer.

In a little over an hour (75 minutes to be exact) I had scanned 164 pages into 51 pdf files. While I took a break to eat supper, I let the software go to work to make those pdf files searchable. That took about 50 minutes. Then I scanned another 60 pages into 22 pdf files. That took 20 minutes. Converting those 22 pdf files into searchable pdf took 12 minutes. Granted, the binder that I selected had already been sorted and the pages put into sequence but it still took me longer to select the pages to be grouped together than it did to scan those pages.

Of course, I'm not "done" with those files yet. I should give each of them a more descriptive name and probably add some tags, comments and descriptions. But at least they are scanned. And searchable.

Hmm, I just noticed that there aren't any options to add descriptive information to a pdf file with Windows Vista. Guess maybe the file name will have to do.

2 comments:

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

Wow, that sounds like an amazing machine! We bought a new 4-in-1 last year, so we're not in the market for a new machine, but if ours falls apart in the near future, I'll keep your recommendation in mind - thanks!

Anonymous said...

Glad to see someone else enjoying the ScanSnap and I am glad my profile experimentation helped someone else. The ScanSnap (I have the S300M) is one of the best purchases I made in 2008 (if ever!).

This is a great blog by the way, my dad is really into genealogy so I will send it to him as well.