I’ve been holding off buying a new Fujitsu ScanSnap to replace my perfectly good S1500M. Today I received a “customer loyalty” email, promoting $200 a bundle that includes the ScanSnap iX1500. Unfortunately, the bundle includes a “warranty” that I would never purchase — so the deal is effectively $100.
Aside from Fujitsu’s abysmal customer support and horrendous software, the licensing limitations of the iX 1500 are scaring me away. I can’t get a clear picture if I can use this on more than one computer without uninstalling and reinstalling the software. And it’s totally unclear how many times I can uninstall and reinstall. If I have to wipe and reinstall the operating system of a computer, is that a “new” installation? Is an upgrade to the OS a “new” installation?
The one feature that I’d pay for is wireless scanning, but people have reported serious problems with that. Also, it’s not clear to me if I have to use Fujitsu’s software in order to be able to scan wirelessly.
So, I’m still sitting on the fence. I hope this program by Fujitsu is a sign that they are realizing that they’ve made a bunch of mistakes recently.
You would get 5 licenses, and it appears that you can unlicense a computer and relicense on another one, but there is some unspecified limit as to how often you can do this without contacting them.
As far as I’m concerned, there is more of a principle that you are buying the hardware and shouldn’t have to specifically license the software that only works with their hardware. For that reason I’m unlikely to buy another Fujitsu scanner even though the license would not be limiting to me.
Is this a total cost of $200 for the bundle? Or a $200 discount from the regular “bundle” cost? If the latter, the cost would be $395, based on information from Fujitsu’s website. No, thank you, not for me.
On further thought - I wouldn’t even do this for a cost of $200. There is a better option - see below.
You state that you have a “perfectly good S1500M”. Why not continue to use that and purchase either ExactScan or Vuescan software? The cost of the “Pro” version (supports OCR) of either is $99. I also have a Scansnap S1500M and plan to continue using it with either VueScan or ExactScan.
Your own words. I am done with Fujitsu, at least as far as purchasing a new Fujitsu scanner. I have seen good reviews for both VueScan and ExactScan, so I will purchase one of these when the time comes to upgrade to macOS Catalina - that is when my older Scansnap Manager software will no longer work.
I’ve now upgraded to Catalina and have moved the ScanSnap S1500M to my headless Mac Mini, which will stay at Mojave. It’s not an optimal situation, and I had to recreate all of my scanner settings, but at least it’s working for now. I scan to an iCloud folder which I have Hazel watch on my MacBook Pro, moving all scans out of there and into my scanning folder. The MacBook Pro is my main machine, and all of my automations are set up to monitor that scanning folder. It’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg-ian situation, but it’ll do for now.
VueScan does drive the ScanSnap, but the quality of scans was poor. Yes, I could spend time trying to tweak the byzantine settings in that software, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I love VueScan’s ability to keep old hardware running, and have used it for decades (!), but the interface still leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not sure if I can create profiles in VueScan, which is a requirement for me as it really speeds things up while keeping the file sizes down.
Finally, the scan button on the ScanSnap doesn’t work with VueScan. Or, at least, it didn’t for me. I was surprised to find that this was sufficiently annoying that I didn’t want to use the scanner. When I scan, I just want to blow through the big stack of things, processing it all later. Having to keep switching back to the Mac to precisely mouse and click a bunch of things really slowed me down.