While I was traveling over the holidays I saw an interesting kiosk in one of the airports I was passing through. It was an advertisement for Neatworks scanning and organizing suite to help people reduce clutter by digitizing all their old receipts, business cards, and documents. Now that is something truly useful, I thought to myself! Right now I have stacks of accordian files that contain all my useful documents for the past 10 years and I have bunches of old reciepts and business cards that I don't really use, but don't want to through away either, and by digitizing them I would save myself quite a bit of clutter.
Buying things spur of the moment like that is almost always a bad idea, so I made note of the name and did some more reseach after I got home. The biggest sticking point is the price. They are asking $400 for the scanner and the software. I just purchased a brand new computer for less than that. If it does everything it promises, then it would probably be worth it, but as you can see on Amazon, the reviews are mixed (when are they not?).
Actually there is a product with nearly unambiguous reviews. The Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 is rated as a five star product after 41 reviews on Amazon, which makes it pretty rare indeed. It comes with 4 different software programs to help you organize your paperwork, business cards, and other files. It's a little more expensive, but not enough to put me off right away (unlike the other $800+ scanners), but now I'm conflicted as to which to choose. After careful review of the Amazon feed back and other sources, here is what I've discovered:
Neatworks:
Pro's
- Cheaper overall.
- All in one fileing system with no other software needed and a slick user interface. This could be a big time saver vs. 4 different programs from Fujitsu.
- Albe to export to PDF, Outlook, Quicken
- Intelligent OCR on scanned items for quick database entry. This is important to me because my primary use will be reciept scanning.
- Excellent website, and has video tutorials on how use the software/hardware.
Con's
- Proprietary hardware and software, meaning it is not intended to work with any other program or equipment. Also, some possible software stability issues. If this is supposed to replace my physical documents, then I really want it to be stable.
- No automatic alignment of scanned items. One review said every document comes out a least a little crooked, and you can actually see this in their video tutorials. That could get annoying quickly, and I can't determine if you can manually correct the issue.
- Only 3.5 stars on amazon after 57 reviews
Fujitsu:
Pro's
- Unparralled scanning and document handling, with auto alignment.
- Good double feed detection and correction, and easy jam clearing
- Non-proprietary, which gives easy access to all documents through the windows file system.
- Reviews say it works with neatworks software
- Folds up, which will help prevent dust from fouling the scanner when it sits idle.
- 5 stars on Amazon after 41 reviews
Con's
- 4 different software programs.
- Fujitsu's Rack2Filer software seems to be a quickly slapped together product to answer the need for software support for their scanner.
- More expensive. If I got this and neatworks for the reciepts, it would be over $500
- No TWAIN driver, which means limited support for other software.
- I'm not sure how well it handles receipts. It's primarily a document scanner, which receipts and business cards as an after thought.
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