Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M, macOS 10.15 Catalina & SANE

Fujitsu abandoned support for ScanSnap S1500M with MacOS 10.15 Catalina, but open Source SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) allows it work on MacOS and Linux.

I’m finally taking the plunge, and slowly moving my 3 macs from 10.14 to 10.15.  One issue was the ScanSnap S1500M.  I search hi and low, read reviews and software support and bought the ScanSnap S1500M used on Amazon of $99 in January 2019.  Unfortunately, I didn’t realized Fujitsu would be so lame as to end support.   Yes, VueScan and ExactScan both support this scanner, and work well, but this is well over $100 of software for a $99 scanner. 

 

I’m finally taking the plunge, and slowly moving my 3 macs from 10.14 to 10.15.  One issue was the ScanSnap S1500M.  I search hi and low, read reviews and software support and bought the ScanSnap S1500M used on Amazon of $99 in January 2019.  Unfortunately, I didn’t realized Fujitsu would be so lame as to end support.   Yes VueScan and ExactScan both support this scanner, and work well.  

However, it would be well over $100 to buy the software.  At that point, I might as well buy a different document scanner.    I’ve been eying the Avision AW210 Color Simplex or Avision AD230 Color Duplex. The price is right, but know nothing of this brand.  For $130 vs $100 on software, I think I could deal with the Simplex (maybe).

But if VueScan and ExactScan have gotten this non-TWAIN scanner to work … Open Source has to.. And yes,  SANE has done so.  And I have gotten to work with both Ubuntu 19 (on a 10.14 “desktop” Mac  in VirtualBox) and on my 10.15 old MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015).  And both work well, at least for the functional part.  The lacking piece is the FrontEnd – the GUI – the Graphical User Interface – that would actually make it useful for macOS users.  I am super impressed with Paperwork but currently doesn’t work on macOS.  (However, this whole projects is python + GTK … so it just the matter of time before it’s working on the mac.  And … well, we need to get into the FreeBSD ports collection as well.) 

Not going to go over the full Liunx and Paperwork side, but quickly, this is how to get it up and running on macOS 10.15 – with command line usage and no OCR support.   However, generally the linux side is the same, just use your distro’s package manager.

 

First, if you don’t have homebrew go get it now.  Of course make sure your scanner is connected 

Next,  a few simple command lines:

brew install sane-backends xsane
sane-find-scanner
scanimage -L
scanimage -d fujitsu -A

And that’s it.    sane-fine-scanner (might need to be re-run with sudo?) will return a lot and possible some pipe errors … look in the text for something like “found USB scanner (vendor=0x04c5, product=0x11a2) at libusb:002:004”.  The last command, with the -A, will give you all the Fujitsu backend driver specific options.   For a multiple page, full-duplex scan , simply insert document(s) and run  :

scanimage -d fujitsu --format jpeg -b -p --source="ADF Duplex" --resolution 300 --mode color

You can message around with options, but this will output will be in current directory … “out1.jpg”, and “out2.jpg”.  This is not a user friendly front end, and will overwrite without prompting. 

Some interesting notes/scripts I stumble over NormanTUD/AutoFeedscanOCR – could throw Tesseract in the mix and get OCR as well, all from the command line.  It may be possible to also use “saned”  to work on the button push. 

Paperwork is really cool.  But hard to install for an average user (a techie, ops, eng/developer – probably can get it done) … but it is really awkward for the multiple page scans in version 1.3.  Author has notes that version 2.0/2.1 will have a revamped interface.  Took me a while to figure out, but use the drop down menu next to the “scan” button, and select “scan from feeder” …then you had to manually enter the number of pages to “process”.  The backend likely auto detects this, but you have to tell the front end (paperwork) how many scans to process.