As part of my paperless office project, I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Mobile Document Scanner a few weeks ago.  Aside from the fact it had a rating of 4.5/5.0 stars on Amazon, the scanner is very heavily recommended in productivity forums for integration with Evernote. To be fair, Evernote also makes a really slick version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Scanner scanner with its branding, for about $500.  I compared the two before making a decision, eventually going with the smaller one just due to not wanting to dedicate so much desk space to its footprint.

We still have a flatbed scanner — an HP Officejet 6500 Wireless All-in-One Inkjet Printer that we bought a couple years ago.  We’ll continue to use it for scanning photographs until those are all in digital format, and I suppose we’ll keep it for the occasional print job, but we wanted something that did duplex (double-side) scanning for normal day-to-day PDF needs.

Up until this point, I had scanned a couple hundred pages of documents on the flatbed, and I knew that it was time-consuming and required merging two one-sided PDFs to get a duplex document back together.  Essentially, you make a PDF of all the odd pages, then one of all the even pages (by flipping over the stack of papers and rescanning) and then you merge them together manually in Adobe Acrobat Professional, though this is easier with smaller stacks since the even numbers start off in reverse order.  In order to get rid of a number of binders from professional conferences, this process wasn’t going to cut it.

The new S1300i scans two-sided documents in color at a rate of 12 pages per minute, and can route them directly into Evernote, an assortment of other cloud solutions, or a specified local folder.  I scanned three 6″ binders (about 900 pages) of Six Sigma Black Belt training material easily in an hour and a half.  What’s really nice is that my premium Evernote account indexes all of the PDF documents I import so they can be readily scanned later from any of my computers or devices.

Given how easy it is to drop our incoming mail or a document from work into the S1300i, there’s no question that we’ll be likely to stay on top of our mail and reference documents better than we ever have before.