Nothing beats manual scans.Scans from a charting software also work if your looking for a particular type of pattern.
To look through the ftse100 companies manually takes me about 5-10 mins.
The reason i can do it so quickly is down to my software i use(metastock)and also my knowledge 
Metastock stores every change you do on a chart automatically. So if i drew a trend line it will always be there until i remove it.Same for support and resistance lines.So any thing i draw will automatically be saved on a live chart. This is a great feature as i dont have to save a watchlist as such.So if i manually go through the ftse 100 companies i dont have to keep drawing the trend lines as they will already be drawn so i can tell when a company is approaching a trend line if i manually scan every day.
This is the main reason i love metastock over other charting packages. Also the fact that you can go through the scans on live charts.They have some how made it possible to load a live chart in around a second.Other charting packages takes about 10 sec or more for a chart to load up live.

Technical or fundamental

So for me a manual scans ,this is  the best way to go as once you get used to looking at a chart it should take you less than 5sec worth of viewing per chart.Any more than that is pointless. Thats why a chartist will trump a fundamentals person hands down every time. A fundamental will take about 30mins or longer to research one company (few hours even)where as i can look at 350 companies in 30 mins and have a better hit rate than they can ever have.At this point people will think im lying. You just have to look at my track record on the discussion boards to work that out.

So thats why its best to learn the art of trading with charts as it gives you the added benifit of being able to spot opportunity in the markets far quicker than researching individual companies.Once you get good at reading charts then it should not take you more than 10 mins to look through 100 different companies by this point you will be ready to place your trades.A fundamental person will be deep in research mode at this point and would have missed the great trade setups as well.

Learning the art of charts even to a basic level will help . Theres nothing wrong with being a fundamental person as long as you use technicals to help in your trading .This is where a lot of people go wrong as they think you could only be one or the other.If your both then that will give you a huge advantage over just the one .

Fundamentals should be used on long term trades. They cannot day trade. Day trades are best left to chartist.We have a fast reaction time over fundamental people.

All the above is just my opinion and im sure many would disagree with me.I some how drifted away from what the topic was.Thats just typical me.

Thanks for reading my blog