Choosing a Scanner
In order to achieve a paperless workflow you must have a method of scanning in your documents. Many of us have a combination printer/flatbed scanner that, if yours is like mine, is painfully slow. The Apple Image Capture software and flatbed scanner combo are great for an occasional document or scanning a photograph, but it is far too slow for an everyday paperless workflow.
Luckily there are a number of good choices out there for the Mac. I did a lot of research before making my choice, but I’ll try to sum it up quickly for you.
The three at the top of the heap are the Doxie Go by Apparent Corporation, the ScanSnap line of scanners by Fujitsu, and the NeatDesk for Mac by The Neat Company. While all three of these scanners have their pluses and minuses, the ScanSnap line by Fujitsu is usually acknowledged as head and shoulders above the rest. Fujitsu fully supports the Mac platform and they include valuable third-party software along with their scanners. Fujitsu focuses on their hardware and as a result has high-speed full-duplex (scans both sides of the paper in a single pass) scanners that are durable, are known for not jamming, even with multiple sheets of different sizes of paper, are fast, and generally just do a great job of turning paper into PDF’s in a way that almost any of us would be thrilled with. In spite of what I acknowledge as a superior scanner, I purchased something else.
I purchased the Doxie Go X2 by Apparent Corporation. While it does not scan in full-duplex mode and while it is a single sheet scanner that is slow by comparison, it does have a couple of benefits that make all the difference to me.
* It has an internal rechargeable battery and internal memory that allows me to scan papers anywhere, completely free from the computer. This is revolutionary for me in t
hat instead of having to sort my papers and sit down at the computer to scan and process all the papers at once, I am now free to do it at my conv
enience anywhere I choose.
* Price: The Doxie Go is listed at $199.00 and is available for significantly less than
that on Amazon.com. This is compared to $399.95 and $495.00 for the Neat and Fujitsu top models. While I would love to have a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 sitting next to my Mac, I am not ready to spend $500.00 on a scanner for home.
With the Doxie Go, I can sit at the kitchen table and as I am sorting the days mail, I can feed it quickly and easily into the Doxie Go with no hassle and no need to process anything at that moment. I just turn on the power button and feed the paper through the scanner. Later in the week when I have time, I can then connect the Doxie Go Scanner to my Mac via an included USB cable and import the scanned documents into the included software to process and send to Evernote for storage. Quick simple and easy, exactly the way it should be. Scanning is one of those things that you can do with the Doxie Go while you are doing something else. For example, you might grab your daily mail, or stack of papers, and with the cordless, portable, and rechargeable Doxie Go, you can work on scanning your daily pile of papers while you watch the evening news on TV killing two birds with one stone.
I realize the Doxie Go isn’t right for everyone. If you have large volumes of paperwork that needs to be scanned in a scanner with an automatic document feeder then obviously the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500, with its 50 page auto document feeder, would be a better choice for you. For me the Doxie Go has proven to be the perfect choice. It’s affordable, it’s portable, and actually it’s kind of fun too!
