Gadgetory

this video will blow your mind drop your jaw and move your bowels okay so maybe I oversold it a little bit this video is of the fujitsu scansnap ix500 and it actually exists not because I think this is the most exciting product in the world but rather because we needed one for the office it's just a handy thing we use and you lot told me I'm supposed to make videos about that kind of stuff so here we go with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts we actually have a network scanner already one that was a lot cheaper but our business is growing in our needs are changing so between walking back and forth only being able to scan directly to two PC's maximum its lack of double-sided scanning and its inability to handle odd sized paper without resorting to the flatbed we wanted something faster and more flexible so in the box for the ix500 we find the USB 3 cable Fujitsu software Adobe Acrobat 11 standard a carrier sheet more on that later and the scanner itself resplendent in an improved black finish that makes it not look straight out of the 90s like the S 1500 that I over viewed last time around on NCIX tech tips software setup is also improved from last time it's much faster to install but one big issue that remains is that if you don't want to use the included CD you have to jump through a bunch of Hoops to download the handy management utilities I really wish Fujitsu would come up with a different way of doing this physically Fujitsu is going for a so easy it only requires a one-button approach here so you unfold it from its compact storage mode and you'll find well just one button on the front labeled scan on the back it's got a Kensington lock a power jack a USB 3 port a Wi-Fi toggle switch and a WPS button for easily adding it to your network wirelessly to scan to multiple pcs or smartphones running iOS or Android but that's about it so the make or break feature of this scanner is going to be how well the software works let's move on it took me a while to get used to this one button concept and the different ways that you can use it so first up you can have the software create a scansnap folder on your computer that temporarily holds stuff so you can email it out or archive it from there and then that folder will just automatically clean everything up after a set number of days that's good for certain types of work like administrative work but the way that I like to use it better is to have it look for whatever device or window is active then target that with the scan file so if card mined there their business card manager is up on my screen it'll it'll go to their if organiser their scan document organizer is up it goes to their and if nothing's up this one's great you press scan it scans to the computer then prompts you with a whole bunch of different options for what it can do with it some of them are useful like Dropbox and Google Docs scanning while others are unfortunately less useful with the email option being bound to Outlook Express by default in Windows 7 and up and third-party add-ons to change to Gmail all the one I tried being a fixa being imperfect at best but the good news is you can configure whichever ones you want to appear and leave the others speaking of configuration options all the usual ones are there so dpi settings go from normal to better to best to excellent I mean really you can pick color black and white singular double sided you can automatically remove blank pages prompt for more pages when you're done scanning or not and then we start to get into some of the more exotic stuff it can use ultrasonic scanning to detect an accidental double-page in the auto feeder it can auto rotate your finished documents to keep everything easy to read once it's scanned and there's even an option to convert everything to searchable PDFs with the included acrobat software so then you can use the organizer to search for any relevant scanned documents very easily in theory most of these features work really well but in practice they're not perfect I mean on a4 paper auto-rotate I'd say is 95 plus percent accurate but with things like business cards and receipts that's probably closer to 75 percent the text detection for business cards and searchable PDFs is also a little bit hit or miss with documents I found that searching for stuff off the top of my head usually yielded the thing that I was looking for but the mode that lets you highlight text and then apply those keywords to documents didn't work that well for me and business parts were all over the place whenever they're oriented wrong by the software text detection it doesn't actually pick up any of the pertinent information and organize it correctly at all and even when they are oriented correctly it missed a lot of stuff I mean to be fair the speed and image quality are good and business cards don't follow very standard formatting but I still don't think that's an excuse for not tracking down basic stuff like the phone number one high point here though is that the card minder application once you've entered all of the missing data and cleaned things up a little bit is really great you can just press a quick hotkey and bring up business cards extremely quickly it's a lot better than having stacks like this just lying around like I have in the past so since we're on the subject of good stuff the document feeder is really great I didn't need the included carrier sheet which flattens out and protects fragile documents at all it does a great job with slightly ripped or even crinkled paper and on the other end of the spectrum I accidentally put in my star citizen card a plastic card in it when I was scanning business cards and if I hadn't been constantly refilling the hopper to do more business cards in one batch without stopping it probably wouldn't have even gotten stuck in the output tray and jammed but even then the scan ended up looking fine I was able to pull it out and I was able to keep going just like that the one thing I was able to defeat it with fairly often was very very small receipts like taxi receipts or weird shaped business cards other than that I was really impressed by the document feeder and the impressiveness keeps coming last time around the mobile app experience with terrible I can even get it working this time it pretty much couldn't have been better remember that bit about just scanning at whatever is open when you press the button after a short simple setup wizard you can get Docs on your phone in two ways you can load a document then press skin in the app on your phone and boopity presto it's on your phone or you can use the quick menu to scan it to the PC like normal then press mobile when the menu pops up it will wait for you to launch the app on your phone then push it to you over Wi-Fi and blough seconds without you even interacting with the app on your phone then if you want to go back to PC scanning mode when you're done you just close or even minimize the app on your phone and everything is back to normal within about a second very cool it completely changes the way we scan fingers around our office because usually we just need something temporarily to email an NDA to someone or something like that and now anyone with the password can scan something directly to their phone by just walking over to the scanner pressing scan on their phone and Boop done five stars right there but of course all of this comes at a cost the ix500 is super expensive especially given that scanners have been commodity items for like 10 years that makes it a really tough sell for the average user but with features like quick paper jam removal user replaceable parts for a longer lifetime and a pretty amazing community building new mods and features all the time for a business user even a smallish one it's basically a no-brainer I mean check out this little hack to use the highlighting keyword feature to automatically censor names on a legal document how much manual crossing out with that save pretty cool anyway guys let me know if you care about us talking about stuff in the future that we're using on the business side of things or if you'd prefer that we stick to consumer grade stuff I really do appreciate your feedback like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment about that thing I just said or if you just have anything else to say I do actually read the comments on my videos if you want to support us there's a link in the video description you can buy a t-shirt give us a monthly contribution or even just do the smallest thing ever change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy pretzels or whatever it is that you buy on Amazon I prep CIL's on Amazon right yeah okay cool all right that's it guys thanks for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips