I'm looking to scan a fair amount of documents for a research project (so I don't have to carry them with me everywhere), and I'd like to get some input on the best way to scan them and convert them into a workable format, like PDF. I've done this the hard way for one-off jobs before, by scanning with my little Canon flat bed scanner as an image then converting to PDF via the OS X print to PDF function, but this is time consuming and the files turn out quite large. Does anyone have any more recommendations on how to do this more efficiently?

I read about the Fujitsu scanner on this thread, which sounds fantastic, but that's a lot of money. I also hear that Kinko's will scan documents for you. How is their service? Any other software or gear that can automate this?