IT Pro Verdict

Small businesses will love Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1500 as it delivers great performance and quality at a very good price. It’s packed with useful features and the versatile ScanSnap Home software makes scanning a pleasure and not a chore.

Pros

+
Excellent output quality; Rapid scan speeds; Quiet operation; Outstanding cloud support

Cons

-
None to speak of

Stepping up to the pinnacle of Fujitsu's ScanSnap desktop scanner family, the iX1500 is designed to make scanning a swift one-tap operation. Aimed at home offices and small businesses, it offers a good speed of 30ppm for 300dpi colour scans, duplex operations and support for simultaneous USB 3 and 11n wireless connections.

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It stands out from the other ScanSnap models as it has a 4.3in. colour touchscreen with a slick menu system. Even installation is a breeze as we connected the iX1500 over USB 3 to a Windows 10 desktop and followed the instructions provided by the touchscreen's wizard.

You can choose from two power modes: the fast option puts the scanner in standby when the ADF is closed while the normal mode powers it off. You can initially set it up for USB 3 or wireless connections and for the latter, the scanner can connect to an existing wireless AP or act as an AP for direct mobile connections.

We then visited the URL provided by the wizard and downloaded Fujitsu's ScanSnap Home and ABBY FineReader for ScanSnap software. You get four licenses for each of these, and the kit also provides download instructions and one license for the Nuance Power PDF Standard software.

ScanSnap Home is a cinch to use and opens with a list of all scanned documents and a handy quick search feature. It starts with three default scan profiles and custom ones are easy to create as the software presents a graphic of the scanner's touchscreen.

The Auto-Scan profile takes the leg work out of scanning. It detects whether they are standard documents, business cards, receipts or photos and automatically applies scan settings and organises them into separate folders on the host.

To create new profiles, we used existing ones as templates and tweaked their settings for resolution, colour, greyscale or mono scans, simplex or duplex operations and scan destinations. Output formats can be JPEG, PDF or searchable PDF and the latter two options can also be password protected.

The iX1500 delivered a perfect performance in our tests. Scans of a 30-page sheaf of bank statements returned 32.7ppm for colour and mono scans at both 200dpi and 300dpi while speed dropped to a very creditable 9.1ppm at 600dpi.

You won't need the top resolution for document archiving as we found output quality and OCR accuracy to be fine at 200dpi. Paper handling is impeccable and we were also impressed with how quiet the scanner is.

We loaded ScanSnap Home on a second Windows 10 desktop and it spotted the scanner via its wireless connection. Profiles for all users are displayed on the scanner's touchscreen so you'll want to customise their names to show which host a scan will be sent to.

Cloud scanning is outstanding - ScanSnap Home supports Dropbox, Google Drive and Photos, Box, OneDrive and Evernote. You can also send receipts directly to the Expensify and Shoeboxed cloud services for expense accounting.

To activate cloud scanning, just create a free ScanSnap Cloud account and log all instances of ScanSnap Home into it. We then created a new profile to send scans directly our Dropbox account and all we had to do was load our documents and select this from the touchscreen.

Fujitsu also offers free ScanSnap Connect iOS and Android apps. With it loaded on our iPad, it discovered the scanner, which displayed our device name on its screen and allowed us to pull in scans over the network.

The ScanSnap Cloud mobile app provides direct access to scans placed in your cloud repositories. We could even use our iPad to take photos of documents and send them as PDFs directly to our Dropbox account.

Small businesses will love Fujitsu's ScanSnap iX1500 as it delivers great performance and quality at a very good price. It's packed with useful features and the versatile ScanSnap Home software makes scanning a pleasure and not a chore.

Verdict

600dpi A4 colour ADF scanner

30ppm at 300dpi colour

Simplex/duplex

50-page ADF

4.3in. colour touchscreen

USB 3

11n wireless

External PSU

ScanSnap Home, ABBYY FineReader 5.5 for ScanSnap (4 licenses), Nuance Power PDF Standard 2 (1 license) software

292 x 161 x 152mm WDH (closed)

3.4kg

1yr NBD advanced exchange warranty

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.