Love is a Warm Scanner

I have too much paper. Between various old documents, bills, statements, and magazines there’s reams of paper cluttering up my life. While I’ve been shifting as much as possible to paperless solutions where possible, the paper still accumulates.

That’s why I love my Fujitsu ScanSnap. It’s a little scanner that tames the paper piles. While I’m using the previous generation I can recommend it whole heartedly. The ScanSnap scans 18 full-color double-sided pages a minute; it’s currently whirring away storing a magazine I want to hang on to. The beauty of the device, is that I no longer have to weight the utility of a piece of paper versus the space it takes up. It all just gets scanned and recycled.

The newer models have a feature that I envy, they run optical character recognition (OCR) on the documents as they scan them. The result is a virtual version of your documents that are also searchable. The older model I have just scans, so I can read or print the works, but they aren’t indexed and searchable by my computer. The new versions have the best of both worlds.

I only have two complaints. First, the ScanSnap isn’t really good at scanning receipts (if they’ve fixed this, let me know because I’d buy a new one immediately). Second, Fujitsu markets the scanners separately for Windows and the Mac, so I can’t just use one for both platforms, but then again, I don’t use Windows much…

Let me know if you have a solution for tackling clutter (especially paper) that might improve my life (or at least my home office).