Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 Deluxe Bundle

If you're someone who's interested in digitizing and archiving all your paper receipts and financial and legal documents--or just about anything you have on paper--there are a handful of consumer sheet-fed scanners to choose from, including Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1500.

What makes the S1500 so appealing is that it's not only compact (about the size of a loaf of bread), but also very fast. This 600x600 dpi color scanner is designed to do one main thing and do it well. It scans documents--both color and black-and white--and instantly turns them into searchable PDF files (if you opt to make them searchable).

According to Fujitsu, the S1500 can scan at a rate of 20 pages per minute. In our tests, that proved to be accurate as we scanned a 350-page manuscript in about 16 minutes. It's also able to scan both single-sided and doubled-sided documents.

As with most of these consumer document scanners, setting up the scanner is very simple. You install the ScanSnap software on your Windows or Mac computer, connect the S1500 via a USB cable, and you're ready to start scanning. Slip some documents into the top-loading tray and then press the button on the front of the unit (it's the only button) and the desktop software automatically launches. You can choose to scan to ScanSnap Manger or another compatible document organizer.

If you're loading a several pages, you have to be a little careful to put all the pages in straight and not add too many pages at one time (you're supposed to load only up to 50 pages at once). With that 350-page manuscript and an almost 1,000-page legal deposition, we had pretty good luck loading about 40 pages to start out, then adding pages as the stack got lower. We had a few paper jams, but the ScanSnap software does a good job letting you continue where you left off (before the jam) without messing up the whole scan. You pop open the scanner, pull any jammed pages out, close the scanner, and hit the button to begin scanning again. The software tells you which page wasn't scanned properly and you can start from there.

Once you scan your document or receipt, it appears as a PDF file in the application. You then rename the file and decide whether to put it in a folder with other documents or receipts. We can't say the software's superslick, but it is easy to use, and it's easy to drag and drop PDF files wherever you want them to go.