Tuesday, December 28, 2010

2010 Best Workflows

A bit longer in the making than anyone would like, but full of good information to set a baseline for live encoding and file-based transcoding workflows. We're happy to present the 2010 Best Workflows report, another in the Transitions in Technology white paper series.

Within the next few days, we also hope to be able to reveal details from a few participants. We'll keep you posted.

[Update: Elemental Technologies chose to publish their findings, which can be found at this link as the 2011 Q1 Best Workflows report, containing the same information as the 2010 Best Workflows plus additional information specific to the Elemental outcomes. Enjoy!]

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Has Fujitsu Abandoned the Macintosh Platform? ScanSnap Snow Leopard Issues

Fujitsu had a good thing going, with the ScanSnap for Mac offering one of the best scan-to-PDF options.

But like all good things, this one looks like it's coming to an end, as ScanSnap on the Snow Leopard platform is walking around gingerly on only two paws.

Consider this:

1. The S1500M is the only current Mac-based ScanSnap scanner; all the others (S300M, S500M, S510M) are on Fujitsu's discontinued list.

2. CardIris 3.6, which ships with the S1500M, is not compatible with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). CardIris 4.0 is compatible, but you don't receive that version when buying an S1500M

3. Adobe Acrobat is now at version 10 with Acrobat X. Which version ships with the S1500M? Acrobat 8. Yes, that's right, the only Fujitsu Mac ScanSnap has a version of Acrobat Pro that's TWO versions old.

When I asked Fujitsu about upgrading to Acrobat 9, six months after it launched, I was told that what you buy is what you get. Meaning that anyone buying an S1500M today will get Acrobat 8.

Fujistu is clearly choosing to abandon the Mac platform, as they've not made a ScanSnap unit that's Mac compatible since 2008.

How's that for progress?