Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Color Duplex Desk Scanner for Mac and PC [Discountinued Model, 2013 Release]

My ScanSnap IX500 is my favorite piece of office equipment which I affectionately refer to as "Darth Vader" due to its glossy, all black appearance. I was excited to hear that Fujitsu was finally updating it and ordered the new IX1500, despite what appeared to be its "vintage" styling. Upon receiving it, I was really disappointed with it. First of all, this thing is really, really ugly and dated looking. You have to wonder if Fujitsu had anyone on the ScanSnap team that has any design experience or good taste. I feel like I have an old piece of discarded office equipment sitting on my desk, not a new sleek scanner. The IX1500 is also inferior in construction to the 500. It feels cheap and plasticy, whereas the 500 felt substantial and sturdy. If it were a car, the 1500 is an early 90s Hyundai while the 500 is a 2018 Mercedes. The new features are also really lame. The only thing that the new touchscreen does is provide another part that can fail and will be expensive to replace. The ScanSnap software works great and the touchscreen does nothing to improve upon or add to it. Also, the output tray on the 1500 is poorly designed garbage. The 500's output tray was sturdy and easy to use. It is only a matter of time before the 1500's flimsy tray breaks off. As for the input tray, yet another design failure. As with the output tray, they took a sturdy, well designed product and replaced it with something cheap and flimsy. I so wanted the 1500 to be an improvement upon the 500, but instead it leaves me scratching my head and wonder what cost cutting, color blind, aesthetically challenged individual is running this business unit now.

After fully digitizing my office, I was tired of waiting and waiting for my previous scanner (an all-in-one) to do its job. I finally bought this one after a year of falling asleep while waiting for things to scan. This scanner does not disappoint. I am using a Mac, and I'm using the installed software. To have it completely scan, index, and save over 1500 pages in less than an hour about made me cry I was so happy. I finished everything up so fast I didn't know what to do with myself after that! It didn't eat any pages (of really soft paper, not regular paper), it didn't skip any pages, and the auto-detect for black-and-white versus color and blank-pages is ridiculously helpful. I wish I'd bought this scanner sooner and didn't suffer through a year of agonizingly slow scanning. It even had no problem sucking in very hard paper (like a cover) and then right back to soft paper of a different size! It cropped everything nice and neatly, too. Love this scanner!

UPDATE: NEW COMMENT: THERE *IS* a "catch all that paper tray" on the front. Another reviewer pointed it out to me and I carefully examined the front panel (the one that flips down) and it's the flush with the tray itself so I never would have noticed it. Problem solved! I took a picture of it...gee, I think I should dust that off.... ;)

ORIGINAL COMMENT SAID "The only thing I'd say that needs improvement is the "out" tray. It needs another flip-up lip to catch the paper as it comes out, otherwise it starts to pop off and dump on the desk. I solved that by resting my hand in front of the tray when all the paper came out. The paper bumps up against my fingers and then re-stacks itself. I tried a coffee mug and a box of Kleenex to block it from falling off, but that makes it slide up so it's just as bad."

I cannot say enough great things about this scanner, so i will jump into the finer points:

1. It's a workhorse. We've been digitizing our entire paper archive of about 500 sheet PER DAY and this scanner has kept up.

2. It's a thoughtful device. When you scan as much as we do, little annoyances become a big deal. Whoever designed this thing thought through all those little annoyances and made most of them go away. I like how the unit recovers from jams and understands which pages to keep and which pages to toss. I like how the one-touch scan button understands when I want to begin a scan and resume a scan. That means I don't have to click over the PC software in order to recover. The unit really does auto-straighten, auto-contrast, auto-2-side, auto-1-side, auto-orientation. It's hard to screw up a scan. The scanning engine even knows how to look for ink/toner bleed through from one side of a page to the other and contrast it out. Wow!

3. Cleaning and care is pretty easy. After 500 pages, there's going to be a little debris in the scanner. The eject button and fold out top is designed well enough that it's easy to gently blow out particles and carefully clean the top and bottom scan heads. No special tools required. It's hard to go wrong here.

4. Scanning to searchable PDF works incredibly well. I'm very impressed. The OCR module does a pretty admirable job of scanning text and making it searchable in a PDF. This is the godsend feature we need. Pro tip: if you're on Windows and you want to use Windows Search to look for text in PDF you need to go download Adobe's PDF iFilter app and install it on every computer that needs to search the PDFs, not just the server or workstation where the PDFs reside. Installing the iFilter *should* turn on Windows Search settings to search the entire PDF and not just the file properties.

There are a couple of annoyances, however:

4. Software installation is clumsy and requires a bunch of updates. Whoever designed the installer/updater wasn't nearly as thoughtful as whoever designed the hardware. It takes a good 30 minutes of downloading and installing and updating to get the software online. Really, there's no excuse for it. Just package the updates into the latest installer and make it easy for those of us who are purchasing later rather than earlier.

5. The actual app software is also clumsy. The ONE THING this scanner needs to do right is to scan to searchable PDF. In order to do this, I had to turn off all the "quick button" features and change the app to scan to application: save to a folder. I pick the folder and now I don't deal with the software at all. I just put documents in the scanner, press the blue button and walk away.

6. Wi-fi setup is clunky and difficult thanks to the bad installer. Wi-fi should be one of the awesome features of this unit, but it's painful to setup because of the stupid software. Also, I had trouble keeping this unit connected to my UniFi mesh wi-fi network. Occasionally the UniFi changes the channel of a particular SSID and this throws off the scanner's wi-fi. I then have to go in to the software and setup wi-fi again. Repeat every time I make config changes to or restart the UniFi access points. Kind of a bummer.

All in all, this crazy little box has saved us so much time and frustration. The best part? I demo'd it before some scanning/archiving company tried to bid us $10,000 to do our scanning work for us and their demo system did far worse than this little scanner. They walked away in utter shame. I love doing that to crummy companies :)

We have 7 of these scanners, with one on all of each of the desks for my Team in my law practice, and one at my home office. They cut down on paper considerably, as we scan documents brought in by clients and hand them back to the clients. I use it at home for both two rental businesses and a construction company we run out of the house. All of the businesses formerly generated a mountain of paperwork to organize and file. These scanners save on filing time, which saves money and tedium for my employees, and they save money on file cabinets and floor space. These scanners are very fast and easy to setup and use. You can scan a document faster than you could shred it. The documents scan to pdf and are then easily stored in electronic files (backed up in a dual core hard drive onsite and in cloud storage offsite). They auto scan in duplex and color. The first ones were purchased in November 2013, and are still going strong 3 years later. The two later ones were purchased in January, 2016, and this one in October, 2016.

Update, Sept, 2017. One purchased in November, 2013, just died. Buying another one. I think that was a good run time for the money, ease of use and convenience.

It all started with there being next to no documentation.

It worked fine for a few days and now I am in software heck with "support" only open on weekdays and problems "communicating with the software error -14" . This is like a 1980's error message and there is nothing on the website to help you. There is next to Zippo for documentation. I have tried all manner of things (resetting computer, scanner, uninstalling and reinstalling software, temporarily turning off antivirus) and keep getting the communication error. Many hours of wasted time.

I tried a second computer and I am getting "Could not perform the recognition process"

I guess I will find out how their support works on Monday. This feels like the beta of a new product or maybe I just got a bad one.

UPDATE: Their telephone support was very nice but after over an hour with the "tier 1" support, they passed me onto "tier 2" support. It turns out there is a software bug that messes up a DLL file. The Tier 2 support person appears to have fixed the problem by updating the DLL file. There is apparently a software update coming that will fix this problem.

Its too bad the error code and the issue has not propagated down to their Tier 1 support so I didn't have to mess around for another 1+ hours.

UPDATE #2 - They have released the fix for the bug in the software and it seems to work. I'm enjoying how fast it can scan through some old paperback manuals that I am scanning so I can save space and be able to find things electronically. I think they could do a much better job with the software and user interface and the documentation is almost non-existent. Overall, I am becoming more pleased with the product as the main thing is the speed of scanning.

---

Feature Product

• Quickly declutter your workspace - create searchable, multi-page PDFs with the click of a button
• Double-sided scanning with advanced paper feeding system - insert up to 50 sheets of paper on automatic document feed (ADF)
• Intelligent scan correction performs a quick quality check on your scans - features include auto color detection, auto rotation for upside down documents, and blank page removal.
• Easy to use software with color, grayscale, and monochrome scan speeds of up to 25 double-sided pages per minute
• Scan your documents directly into integrated cloud services (Dropbox, Google drive, Evernote, and more) to access your files from anywhere
• Compatible with iOS and Windows devices - scan via USB cord or Wi-Fi to laptop, tablet, and smartphone devices.Display Resolution:1,024 × 768 pixels or more

Description

The scansnap ix500 provides PC and Mac users an effective way to greatly reduce paper clutter, storage space, and security risk associated with unmanaged paperwork at home or office. For even greater accessibility and usefulness, users can scan documents directly to an IOS or Android mobile device or tablet. Driver: Specific driver : ·Windows: Does not support Twain/ISIS; Mac OS: Does not support Twain

---

Unreal speed and accuracy. I have used at least 5 different scanners trying to find one that would handle years of old paperwork. I have thousands of tiny fuel receipts on crumpled carbon paper that no scanner would scan without jamming. This thing scans them so fast and hasn't missed a single one. It had literally saved me over 24 hours of work. Never thought a scanner would add days to my life but this one has. Can't recommend enough. And no I was not asked to leave a review. I rely on other reviews when making purchases and take writing mine seriously. Thanks for the awesome product worth every penny.

I am truly amazed how incredible this thing is.
I have stacks and stacks of photos from the 60's up to about 10 years ago when I went digital. Loose photos, 5 albums of photos, and I keep dragging them from house to house as I move, so I finally thought, hell, just scan them all in.

I figured it would take a week or so, I could do 50 or 100 a day.
After it arrived this afternoon, I set it up, scanned the 500 or so photos, and I'm all done.

The interface is mostly intuitive, but some features are hidden, and a message: "The profile menu is disable in quickscan mode" is of no use at all, so I did have to hunt down the instruction manual to find out you have to right click on the icon to get to the menu, which is stupid beyond belief, but after that, finding my way was fairly easy.
There are some other non-intuitive features and it takes some work to figure out how to name everything in a way that makes sense. That could have been handled much better also.

But I still love it! It scans a photo in about a second, and I could put 50 at a time in there, and let it rip.
All I did was sort then into which aspect ratio they were, and fed the stacks in, and poof, I was quickly done with them all!
There was never a jam, never a missed feed, never any problem at all. Smooth working.

I also opened up quite a few just to check color quality and pixel quality, and am satisfied with both.

Next up: Since that was so effortless, I think I'll scan in all of my tax documents. Maybe all documents in my file drawers! 7 years and hundreds and hundreds of papers, ( perhaps 500 or so?) and then all bank records.
Mouuhahaha going paperless.

I'm getting light! Get rid of files full of stuff! I'm so happy!
love this thing.

The iX500 is an awesome scanner. If you're even thinking about getting one, just do it. You'll love this scanner. I have an older ScanSnap scanner, which I've had for 10 years or more, and it still performs flawlessly. I moved the old one to my desk at home, and use the new iX500 at my office. It's fast, and scans perfectly 98% of the time. Scanning receipts, with their varying widths and super-thin paper, can occasionally be fiddly, but works far better and more consistently on here than on other scanners I've used.

FYI, one feature I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is the ability to scan really long documents, such as vehicle purchase contracts. You know, the yellow ones they always fold up into an envelope, but when you open it up, it's literally about 3 feet long? If you have a long document, insert it into the feeder, then press and HOLD the blue button until it flashes, then press it again to begin scanning, and your document will scan as one page, no matter how long it is. VERY cool!

I am amazed at the size of this powerful scanner. The color was a soft white similar to the “soft white” lightbulbs on the market today. Very pleasing to the eye and blends in with my HP printer and Label maker since they are all the same color.
The initial set up was very easy considering I am not a Techie. I did not have any issues connecting to my network. The screen on the front very vibrant and easy to read. The prompts talked me through everything. The cost is very reasonable considering all of its functions, and capabilities.
Nowadays document scanners are the modern-day electronic answer to filing cabinets. I am using the scanner for both my business and personal use since it have the ability to set up multiple users.
The scanning speed was very fast and quiet. Since my purchase I have scanned everything from sales brochures, photos, receipts and multiple size papers.
Love that it scans 30 pages per minute. The auto sheet feed perfectly handles multiple size documents at one time. I mixed 8 ½ X 11, 4 X 6, receipts and a business card in the trays and everything came out in one file. It even duplexed the ones with information on the back page.
Another feature I like is the phone interface software you can download. I have an IPhone so I downloaded the iOS software from the App Store which allowed me to scan receipts and documents from my phone. In under a minute they are downloaded to my DropBox (also can send to One Drive, Google and most cloud base storage software.) account in a specific directory I set up to accept these scans. I was amazed at how fast it worked.
I previously had a Brother ADS 2000 but had multiple problems getting it to work with my updated computer software. Ended up having to scan all my documents to a USB drive, then copy them over to my computer where I then had to rename them. Very long drawn out process.
I highly recommend this scanner for both personal and business usage.

I was hesistant after reading reviews about purchasing the iX1500, but I am glad I did. I have not encountered any of the noted flaws with feeding jams or software other users have thus far. I am fairly IT savvy which also means I expections on this system performing well. I am using this for the home office on a Windows 10 PC and the software loaded and updated without issue. Wireless connections and setup was straight forward as it gets. I set up OCR when scanning documents and could find them via keyword searches without issues. I do enjoy that the software works well and doesn't have a ton of deep menus. The online user manual could use an update since it is broken across many individual pages instead being available as a single webpage.

One thing I did not expect was how small it packs up when you fold over the feeding tray which closes it up into a bread loaf sized piece. Scanning on both sides at 600 dpi takes only about 3 seconds for an 8"x11" document which seems nice to me. I thought about the price tag for a bit wondering why it is over $400 given the hardware isn't ridiculously high-end and doesn't have bluetooth speakers or make sandwiches. I figure the software quality and the R&D is where much of the cost goes because without the streamlined software and filing, scanners are just not going to be efficient in helping record and organize files. The software is solid, the scan filing, OCR'ing, and cloud uploads are all great for simply getting paper into cloud storage. If the house burnt down I would buy this again.