Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 review

We’ve seen many mobile scanners before, but the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 adds a neat new trick to the repertoire. The install CD comes with the usual ScanSnap Organizer and Abbyy FineReader OCR software, but it will also scan directly to the cloud.

Feed it your Google Docs login credentials and it will process the page automatically as a searchable PDF. Alternatively, log in to the bundled Evernote – a service several all-in-one printers also now support – and the same applies. Neither is as flexible as scanning to Word or Excel – you can’t change the format or edit anything – but the recognition is accurate, and it’s useful to know your scans are waiting for you when you get back to the office.

In practice, all of this barely adds to the core scanning procedure. Scanning a two-sided document is idiot-proof: as a page is fed through the scanner, it loops back to land in front of the input tray ready to be fed in again; the software compensates for the orientation. It’s simple but perfectly intuitive. You can do the same with multipage documents too; just keep feeding the pages in and click finish to automatically compile them into one multipage PDF.

The S1100 is the most compact in Fujitsu’s range, hence its manual double-sided scanning, and it communicates and draws power via a single USB connection. One A4 page takes ten seconds to scan and process, or if you feed multiple pages in one scan it can manage up to eight per minute. And it does a great job of figuring out paper sizes, recognising A5 sheets and business cards even when not aligned with an edge. The CardMinder software picked up most of the pertinent info on a range of test cards, and let us edit it all to fix a few errors.

All in all, it’s a flexible little travel companion, and it’s around £50 cheaper than the next model up in Fujitsu’s range, which doesn’t offer cloud scanning. It’s twice as fast and more flexible than the competition such as Plustek’s MobileOffice S400, so the decision comes down to price: a basic mobile scanner can be had for less than £100 inc VAT, but if you want more in the way of speed and features, the ScanSnap S1100 justifies the premium.