Product Reviews

Document scanner. Yawn. Thirty-six pages per minute. Bleh. We know, we know. In a world of sexy and exciting new technology that can stream your entire life wirelessly across the universe and allow your friends and acquaintances to choose which parts of it they want to consume and have it served to them and updated via RSS, the prospect of reading a review of a document scanner doesn't exactly make you quiver with anticipation. But stay with us, it'll be worth it.

Yes, the ScanSnap 500M is just a document scanner, but it's a very good one. will scan both sides of whatever type of document you care to throw at it, or slide into its automatic document feeder, in little more than a jiffy. Bank statement? Check. Business card? Check. Cheque? Check. What's more, at the 'Normal' quality setting - which is actually the lowest quality setting available - and the default compression setting, A4 sheets fly through the scanner with alacrity and pop-up in your PDF reader of choice at the blink of an eye. Even at this most basic setting, quality is pretty good, easily good enough for archiving documents to which you might want to refer later. If you need a higher level of quality, for example, for documents you may want to print at a later date, there are three further quality settings and compression can be reduced on a sliding scale. At the highest quality setting and zero compression, scanning a two-sided colour document took a little over four minutes from start to finish. The quality though, was excellent.

When not in use, the scanner's output tray and document feeder fold

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in and the device occupies a space on the desktop that's smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. In a nice touch, the 500M sleeps when not in use and wakes up as soon as the document feeder is opened. Scanning is activated by putting paper in the feeder and hitting the scan button.

The ScanSnap's automatic document feeder holds up to 50 sheets and more can be added while the first batch is feeding through the scanner. We had one or two problems with sheets that weren't completely flat, however, paper jams were rare. When paper jams do occur, fixing them entails no more than pressing a button on the front of the 500M, which causes the front to fall away, exposing the rollers. The jammed paper can then be easily removed.

The ScanSnap ships with a copy of the full version of Acrobat Standard 7. If you prefer, you can specify Preview as your default PDF reader, or scan to file.

We tested the ScanSnap 500M using several different multi-page documents of varying shapes and sizes and were impressed with the results. Speed and quality aside, there are a number of neat features. For example, when set to autodetect colour or black and white documents, the ScanSnap was able to pick-up even the slightest hint of colour, such as a blue pen mark on an otherwise monochrome document, and scan it as colour. If it doesn't detect colour, it scans as black and white, saving time and disk space, however, its colour detection was right every time.

The only feature missing is optical character recognition. The 500M does a great job of scanning business cards, but it would be even more useful if it was able to read the information on the card and pass it to Address Book, the way a dedicated business card scanner does. And if it was able to read a bank statement and convert it to an Excel document, that would be even better.

Those two quibbles apart, the ScanSnap 500M is an excellent document scanner. It improves upon its predecessor, the fi-5110EOXM, by doubling the resolution to 600dpi and, in our tests, jammed much less often. At £328, it's not cheap but if you need a fast reliable way to scan documents and save them as PDFs, it'll do the job with aplomb.