Fujitsu Scansnap S1100 portable sheet scanner

Fujitsu's range of Scansnap scanners is designed to transfer single-page documents and business cards to your PC in digital form.

Unlike flatbed scanners, the new Scansnap S1100 cannot scan books or other objects, but when it comes to scanning single documents it comes into its own. For that reason it's good for business or home users who need to regularly scan such documents such as receipts and invoices. For smaller documents the software automatically rotates them so they appear straight even if they enter the scanner at an angle.

Fujitsu reckons the S1100 is the smallest Scansnap it's produced and we are inclined to agree: it measures less than 5cm x 4cm and is 28cm wide. There are two flaps that extend to hold incoming and outgoing paper but even with those extended this scanner is very small indeed.

Opening the front flap switches it on. The only connection is a supplied mini-USB cable to the computer, which also powers the scanner. If you are scanning thick sheets, photos or cards the rear flap is left down and the paper or card feeds through to the back of the scanner. Otherwise lift the rear flap and your paper curls up and out after it's scanned. A single button lights up in blue when it's on and is used to stop and start scans.

With software installed from the supplied CD a small S icon appears in the Notification Area. You can start scans by right-clicking it or by using the blue button on the S1100. Then a small pop-up asks where you would like the scanned file to go. The Scansnap Organizer software shows scanned files quickly and allows you to easily convert them for use in Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Google Docs.

It uses OCR software from ABBYY to convert any text in the scanned document so that it's editable, and it worked well in our tests.

Quality was fair. We have had better results from dedicated flatbed scanners but it was quick, at eight seconds for an A4 page. Bumping the quality settings up to the maximum made it to take 26 seconds with little improvement in quality. Even the standard quality one was fine for document archiving, though.

A supplied program will organise business cards once they are scanned so they can be easily searched, and we also used it to scan photographs with reasonable results, though scanning the negatives with a dedicated device will be better.

Our main gripe is that to make it this small, Fujitsu has done away with the document feeder on previous models, so now you must feed each sheet manually, rather than loading a stack and letting it get on with scanning, which is a shame.

Still, as a portable single-sheet document scanner, the S1100 is impressive.