

- #What is the best portable scanner for documents pdf#
- #What is the best portable scanner for documents full#
- #What is the best portable scanner for documents software#
The IRS says you should keep seven years of tax records. Road warriors will need to pack the brick-style power adapter for fast scanning speeds. The Fujitsu S1300i is small enough to fit alongside a laptop on a bedside table. But you can’t get more portable than what’s already in your pocket, with no need to spend on additional hardware. It won’t be as fast, it’s one side of the page at a time, and you’ll need decent lighting and a steady hand. Services like Evernote allow you to take photos of documents from your smartphone, (especially easy with the new app Scannable) and will even convert them to searchable text.

If you are on a really tight budget, you can use your smartphone instead. In the end, we think having more accurate information come out of the other end of the process is more important than speed, but there’s something to be said for getting through your scanning that much faster. It can draw power over just USB with no appreciable loss in scanning speed, so you don’t need to travel with a bulky power brick. The Canon is capable of scanning up to 16.4 pages per minute, compared to 9.4 from the Fujitsu. While not as accurate (and hampered by less-intuitive software), the $240 Canon P-215II is an excellent alternative if you want a document scanner that’s even faster and more compact. You can also save any custom settings as presets, where they'll be available from a pull-down menu for easy access.
#What is the best portable scanner for documents software#
You can save scanned files directly to a folder or assign an application like Acrobat or the bundled receipt management software to open them instead. By comparison, some models recognized less than 80 percent of the same search terms.įujitsu’s ScanSnap Manager does a very good job of integrating the various scan output options within a single interface. Using its OCR software on a scanned document from the IRS, it accurately “read” 99 percent of the word instances we searched for. Of the six different scanners we tested, the Fujitsu S1300i had the most accurate OCR system, able to identify text down to a six-point font.
#What is the best portable scanner for documents full#
And unlike several competitors’ offerings, the S1300i’s full suite of well-integrated scanning software can be downloaded from Fujitsu’s site-crucial for owners of newer iMacs or laptops that come without optical drives.
#What is the best portable scanner for documents pdf#
But it still churns out a 40-page searchable PDF in a very respectable two minutes. The S1300i is not the absolute fastest portable scanner we tested-it came in second to the blazingly fast Canon P-215II. It allows you to easily convert documents, receipts, and business cards into PDF files that can be read by word processing, financial, and contact management software, so you can quickly track down specific expenses and dates without having to physically leaf through a pile of papers. The Fujitsu S1300i is the most accurate portable document scanner that we tested and combines user-friendly software and manageable size with duplex scanning, making it the best choice for digitizing documents either in the office, home, or on the road. How we testedĮnlarge / Although Fujitsu rates the S1300i’s document feeder as holding only 10 sheets, I was consistently able to load a 20-page document with no problem. OCR software needs to be not only accurate but also fast, since you can’t actually save the document until the OCR processing is completed. The scanner software is smart enough to skip any blank pages.Īnother feature you shouldn’t do without is built-in OCR (optical character recognition) software that lets you save your scans as searchable PDFs so that you can later search your documents by keyword. Truly unattended scanning means you can load a stack of single and/or double-sided sheets into the feeder, press the start button, and have every page scanned in a single pass. We rate an auto document feeder (ADF) as being crucial as well. Achieved using dual scanning heads that can read both sides of a sheet in a single pass, this feature is a huge time-saver when scanning even a few double-sided documents.

If you’re looking to scan lots of documents on a regular basis, duplex capability is a must. After researching nearly 100 document scanners, we tested four desktop models, (back row, l to r) the Epson DS-510, Canon C225, NeatDesk, and Brother ADS-2000, and three portable units, (front row, l to r) the Fujitsu S1300i, Canon P-215II, and Brother ADS1500W.
