Raven Scanners? Epson? Fujitsu?

I want to buy a scanner to to get rid of the paper deposits we have around the house.
The Epson ES 300 is about $279 and the raven/Fujitsu is about 400-ish. Worth shelling out more? My wife uses an iPad and windows and I’m all Apple if that makes a difference.
Thanks for any advise/recommendations that you may have!
Happy weekend and stay safe

I have two Fujitsu scanners, a 1500 for home and an 1100 for traveling. Both have been rock solid. Only downside has been software. They were slow to get their older scanners running on 64 bit software. You are pretty much stuck with their software since they don’t provide Twain drivers.

On my initial jump into paperless I scanned 2 banker boxes of documents. I had no more than a half dozen jams or misfeeds with them. Some papers were over 30 years old.

I now avoid paper whenever possible so my scanning needs are greatly reduced. If I had to replace my scanners now I would go with one of the lower end Fujitsu.

Last winter I used a loaned Epson flatbed scanner (don’t remember model) to scan a bunch of slides for a family member. It did an excellent job. I originally thought the scanning would take weeks but I got it done in a couple of days.

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I’ve had a Fujitsu iX500 for over 8 years now. It shows I’ve scanned 17,500 pages, or an average of 6.0 pages per day over that time. I’ve never had any problems with it and would buy a new Fujitsu model if/when this one fails.

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Fujitsu all the way. My business went paperless in 2007. Bought one of these back then and scanned a ton of stuff. Agree with Glen, over time I have a rule. Do not make paper so my needs have reduced too. I have 3 of these scanners, one of which was an Evernote version I was able to upgrade to standard Fujitsu software.
I thought they were expensive at the time but more than worth it.
I also have an Epson flatbed for slides and pictures but for bulk paper scanning Fujitsu is the standard.
It is also incredibly fast.

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I used a Fujitsu scanner for years, but then I went iPad-only and had to find a new scanning solution. Brother makes a scanner (the ADS-1700W)that’s the same size and shape as the ScanSnap S1300, and it’s great because you interact with the scanner with its built-in touchscreen; no computer required. I’ve set up several shortcuts (basically saved settings for different types of scans) that I activate with a single tap, and which save the files to a USB flash drive that stays in the back of the scanner. When I need to, I pull out the flash drive, plug it into my iPad Pro, and open two windows in the Files app to rename and move documents. The quality is just about as good as the ScanSnap, and it’s the best solution I’ve found for working with an iPad. Given your multi-platform situation, this might be a good solution for you.

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I have a Epson workforce ES-580W. The scanner itself is great and works like a charm. The software and wifi connectivity is bad. I wouldn’t recommend any Wifi scanner from Epson at the moment.

We have an Epson sheetfed scanner which works great with Preview on my wife’s M1 MacBook Air. I also have an old portable Scansnap which works well on my M1 mini. Since they redid their software it’s been working much better.

Epson hardware is great. Fast, built like tanks but years ago I couldn’t sell my Epson fast enough bc the software was that bad.

Scansnap has been bulletproof and Scansnap Home is serviceable

I checked out Raven. Looks good but without having a long history to ascertain reliability and no real software advantages my next scanner will be another Scansnap

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Fujitsu hardware is great, the software has become a pain point. You can overcome it with some careful choices in the setup.

We often resort to our Brother multi function printer / copy / scanner. It’s lightning fast cant recall it ever jammed on us. But you have to use a separate OCR application and use something like hazel to automate the processing of the scanned documents. The advantage is that you have full control over the scanning process and can apply it to scans made with different hardware.

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Thank you everybody for the valuable feedback!

So I ordered the Fujitsu 1600 since it was $9 cheaper than the 1500. Going to review the paperless field guide now :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

This might be late, but I’ve been running the Raven scanner for a year or so now. It has the advantage of not requiring any software (or even a computer) because it automatically uploads the scans directly to one or more online services. So whenever I scan a document it goes to the Raven cloud service, my Dropbox, and Evernote for good measure. It’s really nice to just stick paper in it, press scan, and not have to run any programs on my computer, and I can view the documents on a Mac or and iOS device.

Does it do OCR on the documents before uploading?