Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Scanner for PC and Mac (PA03656-B005)

The ix500 Fujitsu ScanSnap is an absolutely first rate product! I don't know if I have ever bought a piece of computer hardware that operates as well as this scanner. And the software works unfailingly, to boot. This product is SO intutive and easy to use. I am not surprised other people have raved about it. I had initially planned to purchase one of the Neato scanners, but after reading reviews of both products, I chose the ScanSnap. Man, am I glad I did. I am now archiving virtually every piece of paper I come across that I may need to refer to one day. I scan it with the ScanSnap, and then transfer it to Evernote in PDF format. The combination of this scanner and Evernote is mindbogglingly simple and powerful. One thing to note. I purchased this scanner about one week before the "ScanSnap for Evernote" product was released. At first I thought about swapping the scanners. Ultimately, I kept the ix500, and I am glad I did. The Evernote ScanSnap purportedly is easier to use with Evernote because its software bundle imports the scans directly into Evernote. However, this only saves one step in the whole process. With the ix500, you must select Evernote as the target location after scanning is complete. I don't mind this step a bit. In fact, it is much preferable to the Evernote ScanSnap, as the ix500 software bundle allows you to send your scans not just to Evernote, but also to any number of other target locations. It also allows you to manipulate the scan, and create PDF's and JPEG's. The ix500 software bundle also comes with a full blown copy of Adobe Acrobat, which is easily worth $100 if you bought it separately. You also get Cardminder, which allows you to scan and index business cards. Trust me, the ScanSnap ix500 is one of the best things you will ever buy. And the ix500 software bundle is far preferable to the dedicated Evernote bundle. I should also mention that you can buy the ix500 from Amazon, Costco and other retailers which offer a 30-day return policy. Evernote offers no return policy. So, you can buy the ix500 with the confidence that if you don't like the product for any reason (and I can't see that happening), you can return it for a full refund. One other thing I almost forgot. This scanner is blazingly FAST! It will do a two-sided scan of a leter-sized page in mere SECONDS. I used to have to wait more than half a minute for a page to scan on my All-in-One scanners. And that was just for one-sided scanning. I don't leave many reviews, but for this product, I couldn't forgive myself for not doing so. The ix500 is truly a magnificent product. Enjoy.

I have owned the ScanSnap for about three weeks now and highly recommend getting it over the other scanners out there. I did some research for about two weeks before deciding to purchase the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. It is a VERY expensive scanner, but well worth it. I was very hesitant at first a purchasing such a high dollar device, but glad I did. I have a filing cabinet full of papers, a butt load of military documents, receipts, paid bills, and all the other crap you need to hold on to. I got tired of have a drawer full of papers that was a pain in the butt to keep organized or to find an apartment document. The Fujitsu ScanSnap takes care of this problem. I was able to scan about 400 documents in just a few hours to include organizing them in a file directory I had created on a backup 1TB portable drive. The scanner performed well, and I only had to rescan like for documents. I only had one or two jams that were easily corrected. This thing is superfast and the quality of the scan is very good. It is very easy to use. Put in up to 50 documents hit the blue button and let it do its work. It scanned receipts from retail stores very well, even the receipts that were faded and crumpled. It can even scan long documents such as the ones you get when you sign a mortgage from your bank. The ScanSnap Organizer software is fairly easy to use, but I cannot give a fair review on it for I'm still learning how to use it efficiently. I even have scanned a few old photos and they turned out pretty well. I did have an issue with machine connecting to USB 3.0. I'm not sure if it is a driver issue on my end or Fujitsu's end. The model I have supports USB 3.0 but currently I have to plug it in a USB 2.0 port. I have not researched how to correct the issue, but using USB 2.0 is fast enough for me. The machine does not take up a lot of space, and fits snugly right next to my HP LaserJet printer. If you are looking for a document scanner and want to get rid of that filing cabinet full of papers, this is the way to go! It is pricey, but you will be getting a very fast and quality scanner that will last a very long time.

I was looking to buy the larger Neat-scanner, as I own the small one, but I did have some issues with that, like paper-jams, which would tear up the (thin) paper as well as small papers, and sorting out where to file the scanned papers. Then I read some very negative reviews about this larger one, and the last review I read mentioned the iX500 Scanner. So, I went looking for reviews on the iX500, which were almost all very positive. I bought mine, it arrived really quick. Setting it up is very easy, and it works fabulously! You can use your own filing system that you build in the Snap Scan Folder, which is easily located in 'My Documents' on your computer, and you can also scan to pre-existing folders on your computer, it's all really easy. It comes with a large cover for small or fragile papers, that takes care of the tearing problem and works really good. The scanner has a single or duplex scan mode, in the later both sides are copied at the same time. Now there is the only slight problem I have, which may very well be that I did not read the - on line - instructions to the fullest, because it resets itself to 'duplex' all the time (except when you count on it...), so to avoid excess memory usage, you have to manually set it to single on a regular basis. When the back of the paper you're scanning is spotless, it will remove the blank side itself, which works well, until there is some see-through from the front or some spots on the back. With business cards it has the possibility to manually remove the back - blank - page, with regular papers to scan it doesn't. If you scan several pages on the same subject, it will put them together in one file, which is really neat. I have gone, in the short period I own it, already through stacks of papers, that I could then destroy. I love what that does to my room! As for business cards - it reads some very well, others really bad, but the image is still visible and one can manually correct the most important parts. Fancy cards with Italic lettering are the worst. But for me personally that is less important, the 50 or so I wanted to scan did not take up too much of my time. And you can, in the 'cardminder' folder that comes with the iX500, look them up on name, profession etc. After I put in my cards and destroyed most of them, my computer, however, gave up the ghost, so I felt lucky I had not destroyed the computer guy's card... (though his name is in my cell phone, for safety's sake). This of course was an extra warning sign: make sure you have a good back-up system. I use Carbonite, which picks up everything I put newly into my computer within minutes and I'm safe. My computer wasn't really dead this time, only the monitor, bad enough!, but we had an issue with my husband's laptop that was slowly dying while I had just convinced him to also use Carbonite. It died, and through Carbonite all his important papers could be retrieved and restored on his new laptop! Back to the iX500: I just found somewhere (in Help I think) that the 'roll' has to be renewed after 1000 pages, but it stated my count stood at only 100 just now (I feel I've used far more already). I haven't looked up what the cost of renewal would be or how complicated it might be to exchange it, but it seems it is some way off still. It seems the cover sheet hat to be renewed too, as logically that my get some wear & tear as it is floppy and it is a hassle to put it back into its protective plastic bag. One of the reviewers I 'consulted', though, mentioned that he didn't bother so far, and everything still worked fine. So, we'll see how that works out. For now, I'm just very happy with this iX500 Scanner, even though the price is higher than the Neat Scanner, but Amazon had a cheaper price, so that worked out too.

Wow! I love my ScanSnap iX500 as much as my iMac and Mac Mini. I have been using Macs for decades and never thought I would use anything else that would attract similar devotion. I have been using my ScanSnap iX500 for 4 months. It gives me time AND space. It gives me time because scanning is fast and easy. It gives me space because I shred old papers after scanning. Mac users will appreciate the awesome software. I followed reviews of ScanSnap for a few years, but was always hesitant about the software. Most reviews were from PC users and I wasn't sure what I would get. From experience with other devices over the years, it seems Mac software is often an after-thought and I was prepared for a mediocre experience with the ScanSnap. Not so. The software is easy and powerful. The thing that makes it powerful is configuring up to 20 pre-defined scan profiles that allow you to control different types of scanning. Tip: Watch the first ScanSnap video tutorial. I think it is only about 3 minutes long. That's all I needed to start. There are many configurable options, but my scan profiles control 3 areas: - which destination folder: personal documents, personal receipts, business documents, business receipts - high resolution (or leave as auto-detect and ScanSnap will choose) - color, gray or text For less important to documents I use a scan profile that lets ScanSnap auto detect everything. For archive documents that have some significance, I use a profile that forces a high resolution scan. I configured all of my scan profiles to prompt for a file name before it saves to the pre-defined folder. And of course while the prompt is up, I can change to a different target folder. You can make the profile name the file for you with a serial number or date. I used NeatReceipts for 2 or 3 years before ScanSnap. It's a different experience. Neat Receipts uses a database to hold all scanned documents, and Neat Receipts does a better job of populating data into certain fields from expense receipts. That part is good. But I found myself re-scanning frequently due to the Neat Receipts software not interpreting the scan correctly, often with large black areas on one side or the other, or on bottom. This has been addressed with improvements. But I still found myself procrastinating with scans. I was a Neat fan and was rooting for them. ScanSnap gets the scan right almost every time, in my experience, it gets scans right about 99 times out of 100 no matter what I throw at it. Scanned images are clear with accurate colors. Key productivity issue: I no longer procrastinate scanning because I know it's not a hassle. I just unfold the scanner in about 3 seconds, it powers up, run the receipts or documents through, save to the right folder on my Mac. Done.

I got excited about the notion of a paperless office at home when I read the reviews for this product, so I forked over the cash and purchased this little gem. It is as fast as advertised, and as easy to set up (if you are talking hardware only) as advertised, but once set up your troubles start. I should say that I am using this little beastie on a Windows 8 computer and the new way of thinking that Win8 is attempting to introduce to the computer world may have caused some of this confusion. Still, it is Fujitsu who needs to be forward thinking enough to prepare for these little problems. Win 8 and its new innovations are here to stay whether we like it or not. Fujitsu does a poor job of adapting. To give them their due, so has most other software publishers. The first problem I had was scanning to Evernote. I read the reviews and they said how easy it was to do and it is, once you figure out how to make the connection. You see, you have to go into the ScanSnap Manager Settings app (not ScanSnap Manager which seems to do nothing) and unclick a checkbox before the Evernote choice appears on the dropdown list of applications to hook up to. I finally found that little bit of gold after dredging through the help documentation for an hour and it didn't precisely say "to hook up to Evernote do this." Instead the statement was much more general. If I weren't a computer programmer already I might have completely missed it. That information should be provided up front in the setup documentation in the first place. BTW, I "chatted" with Evernote about this very thing. They gave me some vague instructions to try a few things, and if I was not successful to call Fujitsu. That's one demerit for Evernote which normally provides really good support to their Premium customers. Then one takes the awesome leap of scanning into Evernote. Beautiful. Except that when I scan a bill I get three pages instead of one--logical since the bill comes on two sides of one page and one side of a second page. One must futz about trying to figure out what to do about that, which is easy after about an hour of playing around; Evernote has a "merge note" option that gives the user the option to merge the scans together. The only problem I am having now is that I cannot figure out how to make sure the notes are merged in the right order, but I am sure with experience that will come. The notes that appear in Evernote also have cryptic names generated by the scanner or Evernote, I am not really sure which one. They are easy to change once you realize you can and I don't really know a solution to making the note titles any less cryptic so I cannot blame Fujitsu for that, but it would be nice if I could have read somewhere, "Just change the note title in Evernote to whatever once its imported." Finally, the scanner comes with some kind of transparent thingie that is supposed to be used to expedite the scanning of...something. I am not sure what, because the instructions that come with the transparency cover are so spotty. They refer to an "operators manual" but I have yet to find it. I am sure I will with patience, but until then this thingie will remain unused and I will probably miss out on another easy addition to the machine tools in the ScanSnap tool box. So what am I saying in the end? This machine is easy as pie to use if all you want to do is scan a few documents into their default ScanSnap organizer, and it is as fast as advertised. If you want to go a little farther, you need documentation, which I have yet to find. Oh, there's a ScanSnap Help application that shows up on the Windows 8 Start page, but all it really does is show the generic help that comes with the application and most anyone who has tried to use that format for getting questions answered knows how frustrating it can be. It's not the same as a "Getting started" manual or the fabled operators manual that exists somewhere. In short, this otherwise great product gets four stars from me because it could be better. And the area in which it could be better is in making sure that I the beginner user knows where to find the documentation that they are constantly referring me to in their short, pithy "getting started" statements. I want to become an expert at using this thing, but without full information that process will be as fun as throwing it on the barn wall to see whether it sticks.

**** UPDATE July 2021 My treasured scanner stopped working. Orange light blinked and it wouldn't do anything. I contacted Fujitsu Support - they called me back QUICKLY to my complete shock - and Dave did excellent troubleshooting and was able to get me up and running again. Error code was (0xD004000D) which is 'ultrasonic sensor error' and this sensor can be disabled, so that is what we did. Scanner will no longer tell me if multiple pages feed at once, but it will now scan, so the tradeoff is okay with me. The ix500 has ~ 3 years of service availability left so I'll see if it will go until then. Phone Support = shockingly awesome!! ~~~~~ **** UPDATE August 2017 This scanner is still working perfectly. It just works every time I use it without any hassle. Paperless is the only way to live and this machine makes it painless. ~~~~ **** UPDATE April 2015 This scanner is still awesome. Still works perfectly, every time I need it's just there doing what it's supposed to, without any hassle. I am as pleased with it as I was when I first scanned countless boxes of documents. I have used it to take several people paperless and it just keeps going, and going. LOVE this device. ~~~~ **** UPDATE 1/29/2014 This machine continues to perform flawlessly. In combination with ROYAL 1840MX shredder, the journey to paperless was smooth sailing. To date I have still had only one jam in this scanner. I've scanned thick paper, thin paper, ID cards, credit cards, bills, long paper, thick bond, parts of forms, notebook paper galore, card stock, receipts. For very thin paper or long receipts, I use the plastic carrier sleeve. Still love this machine! ~~~ Many have written lengthy and informative reviews (which I appreciate, thank you) so I'll just add my two cents. This was one of the simplest installations of a peripheral that I've ever experienced. The scanner works perfectly. It pulls paper in straight, scans and OCR's lightning fast, and has more options in the included (excellent!) software than I've had time to look into. I simply changed the default folder and I was off and scanning! The software tells me that I have scanned 1621 pages. I had one jam, when I tried to feed a long Lowe's receipt in all by itself - the scanner ate it. I fished it out and it was origami. However, I was able flatten it and put it in the included plastic carrier sleeve, and it still read it perfectly. Now these 1621 pages live on my Mac and are searchable and included in my backups to Time Capsule and to the cloud. And I am free of all that paper! I will echo what some others have said in that it is rare that I encounter a product so well designed and effective, that simply works perfectly. This was a sizeable investment that I considered for some time before taking the plunge - I am very, very glad I did. I love this machine!

I absolutely love this scanner. It does exactly what I want it to do. I use Quickbooks to track my personal spending and Quickbooks gives you the option to attach a document to a transaction such as a receipt so that later on when you go "what the heck did I spend $200 on at Walmart?" you can just pull up the receipt. So I had previously been using a flatbed scanner to do this. And it would take me hours to go through them since you have to scan them one by one. With this I just stick in a whole stack of receipts and press the scan button and in under a minute they are all scanned into the computer. I personally have not tried the Neat Desk, but I was seeing mixed reviews for it and this just seemed like the superior product so I went ahead and spent the extra money for this and I believe it was absolutely worth it. I use a MacBook Pro Retina with Windows 7 installed via bootcamp. So one of my concerns when looking at the Neat Desk was that you have to specify whether you want the mac version or the windows version. This scanner on the other hand comes with software for both operating systems and works flawlessly in both. It also allows you to connect via wifi on both, which I really like. The scanner only allows you to have one computer set up to connect with it by wifi at a time (although you can connect to other machines by USB). So I figured it would see my Mac partition and my Bootcamp partition as two different computers but it does not. So I can scan wirelessly no matter which OS I am currently working in. And on that note the wireless scanning works every time. There is no delay or anything like that. It is just as fast as if you were using a USB cable. I do not use the organizer software that comes with it. I just save anything I scan as a PDF and file it myself. However, I do use the business card organizer (CardMinder) and it works great. I get a lot of business cards from people so it is nice to be able to have a searchable database of cards rather than trying to go back through all the cards I have to try to find one. CardMinder is pretty good at picking out things like the Company name, phone number etc. from the cards but it is not perfect. So you can manually correct the fields that it gets wrong. Also, if it picks the wrong line you can correct it by selecting the correct line on the card image. So for instance the one card I scanned in, it selected the word GMail as the company name. So what you can do is click on the image of the card and drag a box around the company name. Then if you press the button next to the company field it will use whatever is in that box as the company name. A word of warning though. It is kind of finicky. It will only look at what is in that box. So, for instance, if when you drag the box over the word(s) you don't quite get the bottom of the word in the box, it gets all messed up because it will not look at the bottom of the word. It has jammed on me a couple of times but I was pleasantly surprised by how infrequently it jams, especially when dealing with receipts which are different lengths and things. I do try to scan skinny receipts separately from normal sized receipts though so that I can set the feeder to the correct width. When something does get jammed though it is very easy to fix. There is a release lever that allows you to open the scanner and remove the document without tearing it. The scanner also recognizes when a paper jam occurs and stops scanning. It will then show you a preview of the page and ask if you want to keep it or not. You can then reload the documents back into the feeder and press continue scanning and it will just pick up where it left off. It also senses the thickness of the paper and if it detects that it has accidentally grabbed two pages instead of one it will automatically stop and do the same thing. Ask if you want to keep the page etc. I do have a couple of minor complaints. I wish there was an option to scan several pages as individual documents. If there is, I have not found it. Instead if you put multiple pages in the feeder at once it scans them as a single document. However, it comes with Adobe Acrobat (although it's only for Windows) which makes it very easy to break apart documents. You just have to select the pages that you want to be separate documents and select extract pages. Then just check the save as separate documents box and the delete after extracting box and select where you want them saved. Also, there appears to be a length limit. Occasionally I will get one of those 2 foot long grocery store receipts or something and it will stop scanning part of the way through. But those are few and far between for me, so it hasn't been a major issue. I tried folding one in half and putting it in the feeder (fold side down) so that it would scan duplex and just appear as 2 separate pages in the document, but I would still have one receipt. It did not like that one bit. It got all jammed up. So don't do that haha. I eventually just decided to cut the receipt in half and scan it in as 2 separate pages. And just one more tip. The ScanSnap is is pretty good about straightening documents and getting documents facing the right direction, but again it's not perfect. Sometimes the words will be slightly crooked or a page will be upside down. Rather than going through the whole document and correcting each page, just OCR the document. In order for the document to be searchable the words have to be right side up and straight, so Acrobat will correct each page before making it searchable. This will correct 95% of the pages that ScanSnap gets wrong.

This scanner is helping me tame the personal paper monsters I have been fighting for the last few years. As the "paperless" world has taken over (hahaha!!), my pile of paper has grown immensely, to the point that it was drowning me; I couldn't find anything, and trying to get things done like taxes filed was becoming impossible because of it. So I bought a couple of 2TB external drives, and determined that I would digitize everything. Well, I tried doing that for about a year using one of those HP multifunction machines (fax, scan, print), but after that year, I was further behind than ever, because the speed of the scanner was way, WAY too slow to keep up with the paper monster. I decided that if I didn't get things scanned faster - much faster - I was soon going to get in real trouble. I bought this Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 about six months ago; I'm STILL not completely caught up, but I have been gaining serious ground. I think in another six months, I will have it all under control. The limiting factor now in catching up is not the speed of my scanner, but the amount of time I have available to spend scanning my personal documents. The house is less cluttered than it was, and it's getting uncluttered more and more as each weekend passes. It is a serious stress reducer. This scanner scans documents at 1200 dpi about half as fast as a commercial HP scanner costing about five times as much scans documents at 600 dpi at work. It does scan letter-size documents at 1200 dpi at about 20 ppm. In my book, you can't ask for much more than that. Now, this scanner is not built quite as sturdily as the commercial-duty scanner at work, and it perhaps would not take the punishment my work scanner does. But for your personal/family/small business scanning, it can handle more than you can throw at it (not including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eight-year-old kids hitting it with errant kickballs or baseballs). This scanner comes with Adobe Acrobat Standard, which is really nice, in my opinion. It will allow reading the stored documents on just about any computer anywhere. I find it indispensable. This adds a lot of value to the machine. I do not use the software filing features the machine includes. I make up my own folders the way I want them made up through Windows 7, and I just want the machine to put the files where I tell it to. I suspect the filing software would cause me some difficulty at SOME point - say, if I were to buy a different brand of scanner after this one dies. So I would just rather file my documents myself. The controls for setting the type of format you want to use, the quality of the scan, etc. are pretty easy to use. I had no difficulty. I honestly don't know how long it would take me to figure out the filing software, nor what any of those characteristics are, so I can't judge that. The only negative that I have found with this machine is that the output tray, which folds up in three joints, is that it is very light, and if I'm not careful, I hit the tray with my hand when I move toward it with paper, and it flips up and folds at the first joint. It folds up nicely when you are done using the machine for a while, and as several others have pointed out, the scanner has a surprisingly small footprint when it's not in use. But the lightness (some might say flimsiness) of the output tray is perhaps the one thing that would not allow it to be used in an office environment where several people were using it throughout the day, every day. While have had a paper jam or two, it was certainly not a fault of the machine. I put some papers in the feeder that were kindof crinkled and of different widths. I have used the machine for more than five months now, so I think I have given it a decent, though not severe, tryout. Bottom line: this machine is fast, delivers quality output, is pretty flexible, easy to use, and a good value for the price. For the average one or two-person operation, I think it will last a long time, and for many thousands of scans.

Uno de los mejores aparatos que he comprado!!!! Me ha dado un resultado increíble ya que escanea por las dos caras al mismo tiempo y lo hace rápido!!! Es un excelente equipo!!!!

El scaner ScanSnap iX500 superó mis expectativas. Realmente es el mejor escaner para uso personal que he visto, incluso supera a varios que son para el ambiente empresarial. Escaner de alta gama, sin duda.