Good hardware but no twain driver is a significant limitation

I purchased this scanner as a first step in creating an electronic filing system for a home office. As I accumulated 20 filing cabinet drawers of paper documents going paperless seemed to be an answer.

Purchase of the Fujitsu S1500 was based on the numerous 5 star reviews. I am reasonably tech literate and have used the scanner for about 2 weeks. Here are my initial impressions:

Pros -

1. Speed: This scanner seems blazingly fast. Not a resource hog. Will scan duplex 20-25ppm at default settings on Win2K/1.8mhz/1gb platform.

2. Scan quality very good at all settings.

3. Size and looks: Small desk footprint. Looks great open or closed.

4. Excellent paper feeding as long as documents are same size and 20# or greater paper weight.

Cons -

1. NO TWAIN DRIVER. I knew this going in but did not appreciate how much this would cripple the device in day to day use. Let me explain. I had envisioned creating a virtual file cabinet in my computer using Windows Directory/Folder/File system then scanning my paper documents into this system as pdf files. The problem is that the native Fujitsu software does not let you append an existing pdf file!!!

As an example take a file for utility bills. D:/Home Expenses/Utilities/Gas_Electric.pdf. You can easily scan in all prior bills(limited by 50 sheet ADF)and a pdf with one page for each bill will be created. But if you had more than 50 prior bills or when next months bill comes then the next scan you perform to include these new documents will create a new pdf and does not allow the option of appending this current scan to the existing pdf. As you can see one could easily end up with 1000s of individual pdf documents in your filing system. The work around is to launch Adobe Acrobat (not reader) and use it to open the old composite pdf and use Acrobat to append the newly created pdf to the prior file. This work around takes longer than scanning in a 30 page document. Twain based scanners easily work with existing windows file structure and allow you to append an existing pdf without invoking Acrobat.

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