My Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i is Still Awesome One Year Later

I recently realized that I have been using my awesome Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300i scanner for a little over a year now. One year later, it is still awesome and one of the most important tools I have to keep me paperless.

Given that I’ve been using the scanner now for over a year, here’s a few thoughts on my experience with the scanner and how things have changes in the year that I have been using it.

1. The s1300i is still the primary way I go paperless, converting any paper I get into digital form by running it through the scanner and getting rid of the paper.
2. In the year that I’ve been using the scanner, I cannot recall a single occasion upon which I have had a problem. The scanner rarely jams; its paper feeder is excellent. And on the rare occasions it has jammed, it has almost always been user error.
3. I have learned to speed up the scanning process by turning off the features in the scanner software that create searchable PDFs. This slows down the scanning, and once the document is scanned to Evernote, the resulting PDF will become searchable, thanks to a similar feature that runs on Evernote’s servers. This allows me to scan paper in quickly, but still get searchable documents out of them.
4. Part of what makes the scanner so successful is that it is incredibly simple to get documents into Evernote. I set the paper in the feeder, push the scanner button, the document is scanned and it automatically appears in Evernote. Done.
5. When I started using the scanner, I had a bin on my desk in which I’d collect the paper I needed to scan. A year later, I no longer have the bin because I no longer get that much paper. Today, when I have paper I need to scan, if I don’t scan it right away, I simply set the paper on top of my s1300i, and it is there waiting for me the next time I am ready to scan.

I think we often take for granted tools that just work without any problems. Televisions and refrigerators are two such appliances that I’ve had little occasion to complain about. And my ScanSnap s1300i is another one to add to this list. It just works, no problems, and has done so for over a year.

I wanted to try to figure out just how many pages I’ve scanned in that year, but I ran out of time. Extrapolating from some data I pulled from Evernote, however, I think I’ve scanned on the order of 500 documents, probably totalling somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 pages. The frequency of scanning has gone down considerably because I get less and less paper, but that still averages to between 3-5 pages per day.

Kudos to the Fujitsu people for making such a reliable, useful scanner. It has been a big part of why I have been able to go paperless.