I recently picked up an Epson GT-S50 Scanner for a project I am working on for a client.
My Client’s office is using Windows, and at home I have a combination of windows and Mac.
I’ve read tons of great reviews on the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners (like the S1500), but you have to buy a mac or windows version of those, and they only work with the built in software. There were some issues when Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard came out, and the scanners lost a lot of functionality for a few months while Fujitsu readied new software.
The big draw to the Fujitsu is how good the software is that comes with it. It does a bunch of things for you – and may people say it “just works”.
After reading a review on the Epson GT-S50 online, I knew the software wasn’t as polished, but wondered how far off it would be..
Impressions:
I connected the GT-S50 to my Macbook Pro and installed all the latest drivers.
The epson has a nice 2 line display that tells you what’s going on, and on Windows you can see what preset you have selected, along with the description. On the mac, the description is gone, you see Job 01, Job 02 etc…
One button scanning is HORRIBLE. Awful, the worst. It takes FOREVER to even get the thing started. In fact, I thought I’d time one and it’s been 2 minutes and the software still hasn’t scanned (the panel says Scanning and the software launched on the mac so it’s doing something.) When I hover over the ‘Progress’ Window, I get the beachball of death.
Ok 3 minutes in and I’ll ‘force Quit’, but the scanner still thinks it’s scanning.
Click the red button on the scanner, – power light stops flashing, display still says Scanning.
I thought I’d scan once manually with the Epson scan software, but when I launch that, it shows the icon in the doc, but no menu.
I tried launching Apple Image Capture, but the scanner doesn’t show up so it’s now time to power cycle the scanner.
At this point I’m thinking the scanner sucks, but in reality, the software they have for ‘one touch’ sucks.
The reason you’d buy an Epson over the Fujitsu is because it has a twain driver, and the Fujitsu does not. This means you can use other software with the scanner.
So now I’m out to find out if any of the other software is any good.
I have adobe Acrobat Pro 9.3 installed, and it can scan using the twain driver.
Acrobat does a great job with the scanner, it’s just a little slow. The whole process is slow, but…
If you use Acrobat to scan, you’re pretty much done when you’re done. Since Acrobat Pro does the OCR, the deskew, the page rotation, the auto page sizing & the image compression there’s no need to go into another program to clean it up. In fact ,after you scan, your document is sitting in acrobat, waiting for you to save it – So you don’t even have to go find it and rename it. When you’re done, you’re done…
Still I wondered if I was missing out on the scansnap - There’s so many good reviews of that thing.
I thought about it for a bit, but decided that the twain interface was something I really liked the flexibility of having.
And the Epson scanner seems better built (11 lbs vs the 6lb fujitsu)
And I’d read more than once about the fujitsu misfeeding issues.
So at this point I feel the Epson has the best hardware, but not the best software.
Enter Image Capture.
The macs come with a program called image capture.
I opened it, and my scanner was there, so I used that – It was fast!
it doesn’t do everything that acrobat does, but if you need to whip up a quick letter sized pdf, it does the trick – quickly!
This has me on a hunt for more apps that support the image capture interface.
So far I’ve had little luck.
I tried 2 or 3 apps that support image capture and in all cases the scan comes up as a gray box.
So I’m not sure what’s up, but somethings up.
I’m also not sure if the image capture driver came from epson or apple.
I need to hook it up to a second mac, one that hasn’t had the epson drivers installed, to see where the drivers are coming from, and then hopefully I can point to either apple or epson and get the problem fixed.
(for all I know the image capture driver might be using the twian driver and not displaying the dialog)’
#1 by Peter Davis on June 14th, 2010
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Did you ever get Image Capture working?
I’ve been thinking of buying the GT-S50 over the ScanSnap, hoping the TWAIN drivers would help me avoid “lock-in”. After all these decades nobody has gotten scanner software right! Sounds like Fujitsu has come close yet when OS-X 10.7 comes out, we’ll all be stuck again. And when 10.9 is around, who knows if they’ll even support it anymore? Argh!
#2 by admin on June 14th, 2010
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Image capture (the app from apple) works great. There were a few other programs that claimed to work with image capture, and I couldn’t get those working.
I recently rebuilt my mac and I was curious where the Image Capture Driver came from – it comes from apple – Image Capture worked with the GT-S50 before I ever installed the drivers from Epson.
My workflow is basically to use Acrobat to scan via Twian (Acrobat on the mac doesn’t support Image Capture nor ISIS drivers) which has worked out pretty well.
The Image capture app from apple can also create PDF’s but they aren’t searchable and they are quite a bit (5-10x) larger than the PDF’s Acrobat creates.
I think the Epson is a solid scanner for the money (Cheaper than the Canon and Fujitsu)
I am still curious about the Canon, as it was rated faster and still has twian drivers.
Unfortunately for Canon (and me) there wasn’t anywhere I could go see/get one.
Other than twain, I don’t think you can go wrong with ScanSnap- people seem to love them, and it comes with Acrobat, which is a must have. It is disappointing that there is no twain driver, which means there might be scenarios in the future where you have to scan to a Tiff file then import it into another program- that said, 99.5% of what we scan we likely want in PDF format, and I think the ScanSnap has that down, plus although late, I think Fujitsu’s been pretty good about supporting older product with drivers.