RestartGTD Giving Obsolete Technical Advice!!!!

Source: Amazon.com
*Note* The S1500 is a top-down-face-down scanner, so the documents
in these promotional pictures are backward and downside up

Introduction:

It has come to my attention that Fujitsu released a new ScanSnap scanner at Comdex this year.  The new scanned is named the ScanSnap iX500.  The differences between S1500 and iX500 are (see Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing review):

  • Speed: S1500 is 20 ppm vs iX500’s 25 ppm.
    • PPM (page per minute) means physical sheets of paper, if you have double-sided originals this means 40 and 50 logical pages per minute.
  • Connectivity: S1500 is USB 1.1 and 2 only; iX500 is Usb 2 and 3 and wireless-to-android-or-iOS scanning.
    • Scan a PDF from iX500 directly to your smartphone or tablet
  • A more robust paper feed system borrowed from a higher end Fujitsu scanner.

So what?

The single most powerful thing you can do to get yourself on the GTD wagon, and keep yourself there, is to get a great scanner and move all your documents from paper into Evernote.  Once you have Evernote as your repository for reference filing, it becomes easier to stay organized, than to degrade into disorganization.

Want to get on the GTD wagon as stay there? Then buy the iX500.  Why the iX500?  Because if you buy the best, you will only cry once.  You can see my before/after GTD pictures and story here.  The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M was a big part of my GTD conversion experience.  Once you build momentum getting all the clutter turned into organized searchable reference files, you will have a good organization feeling going for the rest of your GTD restart.

Conclusion:

For the last several years I’ve been using a Fujitsu S1500 ScanSnap scanner to digitaly store all my paper documents. As I’ve said before, the ScanSnap truly was a life changer for me. I had no idea that a sheetfed scanner could be so convenient, fast, and reliable.  

Mark Fauenfelder

If you know you need a great scanner, just buy it.  You won’t think about the price after you start using it.  You will feel the pleasure of increased organization, decreased clutter, and increased focus.  Buying a scanner for GTD is not about cost, it is about value.  The value awaits…

bill meade

p.s., I don’t think you can go wrong buying either the S1500 or the iX500 scanner.  You may be able to get the S1500 for less than its normal $419 while the iX500 is filling the marketing channel.  Either way, you won’t regret the purchase.

p.p.s., I discourage buying the ScanSnap S1300 or S300M scanners because by comparison, the $100 saved comes at the cost of a huge performance hit.  Instead of a 50 page input bin, you have 13 page input bins.  Scan speed is also slower on the <S1500 scan snaps.

3 thoughts on “RestartGTD Giving Obsolete Technical Advice!!!!

  1. I am using the generation older ScanSnap S510M, and agree with you on the … just buy it … advice. I have been using this thing for years and it is a beast. I’ve scanned in thousands of documents. The first month I had it, I emptied a 5 drawer lateral file that was full of old files, and then promptly went through about 7 years of old boxes of papers from the attic. This thing made me nearly completely paperless.

    Unlike the author, I scan into DevonThink Pro Office instead of Evernote. I love DTPO and together with ScanSnap, life is good at the desk’s inbox. I use DTPO’s OCR as well.

    As an added value for buying the scanner, I’ve used Adobe Acrobat Pro many times for work assignments that I would have probably never bought the software for, but its is very powerful.

  2. I stopped using the OCR that came with the ScanSnap S1500 because the OCR in Evernote was at least as good, and it saves a lot of time to not OCR on the computer before uploading to Evernote. So, even if I bought the iX500, I would not plan on using the OCR on it. So: (a) I’d buy the cheaper bundle without Acrobat X, and (b) the price difference will pay for almost 2 years of Evernote pro.

  3. I’ve read some reviews on line and, supposedly, the ocr on this is really good. Those reviews don’t say, though, whether that holds when you’re scanning to an android device, or, directly to the cloud - say to drop box which doesn’t, itself, do ocr. Anyone?

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