Imagine if you will a chap in a lab coat handing over an envelope to another chap. Very Top Gear, very much “our producers set us a series of challenges.” Now replace the envelope with an email and the whole Top Gear conceit with me, the wifey and a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Scanner.
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| this dinky thing is a scanner! |
That’s right, we’ve been given a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 scanner and a series of weekly challenges. Hurrah!
Our first challenge was to set the ScanSnap S1300 up and scan one of the boys objects d’art. In this case, a picture of some sort of superhero, and very possibly a flag. Not too clear on the flag and neither it turns out is he.
Being a bloke of extreme blokeydom, I opened the box, threw away the continental plug cable, most of the packaging and the instructions. Fujitsu were so super confident of the ease of use, I figured I would be wasting my time on the instructions.
There’s nothing like a challenge is there? Unfortunately this was nothing like a challenge. I obeyed the bright yellow sticker on the ScanSnap S1300 which told me to put the disc in my PC first and loaded the software on. Initially it told me it was going to take 7 hours to install but it quickly revised this down to four and a half minutes. Which was a relief. Whilst that was chugging away I decided to look at the cables. Power adaptor, mini USB (every other scanner I’ve used has a big chunky square cable and these are easy to lose, hard to find a spare for), and joy of joys, a USB power adapter cable.
That’s right, you can power the Fujitsu over USB, so if you’re like me, sitting on the sofa with a netbook, you can do without a plug socket entirely. Given how dinky the ScanSnap S1300 itself is, this is a work of genius.
So, software installed, I hooked the scanner up to my netbook and was delighted to see that even on battery power, the scanner was happy to be powered over USB. A big clear button was obviously the scan button, the scanner obviously opened just like that, and the paper went in there. It looks a bit like a portable printer in as much as it’s sheet fed, rather than an A4 flatbed design. This means you can keep it somewhere out of the way without it taking up acres of space
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| a superhero and very possibly a flag… |
I had a momentary pause at this point to consider which way up the paper had to go but then made my choice- there was drawing on the back anyway- and hit the scan button.
Good grief! The ScanSnap S1300 only has a duplex function! How on earth have they crammed that into such a small device?! A quick flick through the settings and I was off again, this time changing the default file format from PDF to Jpeg.
And that was it. I was even able to watch The Dark Knight whilst doing it. I’ll tell you, they better make the subsequent challenges much harder because this one was an absolute breeze!