Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Less Clutter, More Space
My home office has always been a cluttered mess. Too many books. Too many papers. Too many gadgets. And not enough working space. Not any more. I'm on the road to getting organized. I recycled my old AnthroCart desk and bought a new desk with plenty of work surface and storage space.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
Update: I had to update the link that describes how to use the S510 with a Macintosh. Unfortunately, the article contains broken links too. The Japanese version of the ScanSnap drivers are here. The English resources for the drivers can be found here.
Now I needed somewhere to store all of the scanned documents that could be accessed from any of our home computers. I looked at a lot of different options (such as the Netgear ReadyNAS and the Apple Time Capsule). I ended up buying an HP Media Vault MV2120 (along with a second SATA drive to do RAID 1 mirroring). It was very easy to set up, quiet and unobtrusive.
My scanning workflow is pretty simple. I run each document through the ScanSnap. Once OCR is complete, I drag the PDF to the appropriate folder on the Media Vault and I'm done. The ScanSnap is incredibly fast so it's easy to take a pile of documents and run them through in a few minutes.
The saved PDF documents are in "PDF Searchable Image" format which means that they include page images as well as searchable text inserted by OCR. File size varies between 100k per page for black and white up to 300k per page for color. But disk space is cheap. 50GBs would store 150-500k pages of scanned documents.
We have a mixed Windows / Macintosh household so it would have been nice to buy a single scanner that works with both. Unfortunately Fujitsu sells two different models: the S510 for PCs and the S510m for Macs. But, as it turns out, the hardware is identical and with a small amount of effort you can download and install the software to use the S510 with a Macintosh. (And the color scheme of the S510 matches the rest of the gadgets in office better than the S510m anyway).
By the way, the ScanSnap S510 was on sale at NewEgg (with a $50 rebate from Fujitsu) when I bought it in March. The sale and rebate program are over now but I've heard that the S300 (or S300M) is quite nice as well and is over $150 cheaper.
Update: I had to update the link that describes how to use the S510 with a Macintosh. Unfortunately, the article contains broken links too. The Japanese version of the ScanSnap drivers are here. The English resources for the drivers can be found here.
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