Reviews: Fujitsu fi-6230 document scanner

Professional, high-volume, document scanners can be both expensive and bulky. The fi-6230 from Fujitsu, however, is affordable and compact, making it a good choice for the small business looking to capture large amounts of printed information.

For those looking for a really compact unit the almost identical fi-6130 comes in at just £589 ex Vat and takes up about a third of the space. That’s because the fi-6230 has an additional flatbed scanner bolted onto the front to handle books and other documents that the basic sheet-fed scanner, built into both models, can’t accommodate.

That said, the Fujitsu automatic document feeder (ADF) is very flexible, employing what the company calls ‘reversing rolling’ technology to enable it to cope with everything from very thin and fragile materials to thicker card. It even takes plastic, up to 1.4mm thick.

The ADF has a capacity of 50 pages and includes an ultrasonic sensor to detect misfeeds. Duplex (double-sided) scanning comes as standard and maximum throughput is said to be 80 images per minute at 200dpi. Actual results will, of course, vary depending on the type of document involved and the resolution selected, the maximum being 600dpi.

Colour documents are detected automatically with auto-resizing (A8 - A4) and de-skew capabilities built in to make it easier to handle mixed document batches. We found it to be quick and capable, no matter what we threw at it - from tissue-thin faxes through to plastic credit cards.

With its robust construction the fi-6230 should be more than capable of handling the scanning requirements of a small business or workgroup. It can even scan very long documents - up to 3,048mm (about 10 feet) in length, should the need arise.

Power comes via an external AC adapter and the only interface is a single USB2 port for direct attachment to a PC (cable included). Controls too are minimal, with just an off switch plus an error indicator and buttons to start/ stop a scan and open a host application.

Buyers of this type of scanner will, typically, want to use it with a document management system of some kind, for which Windows Twain and Isis drivers are both supplied. Otherwise you get a fairly basic Windows-based program called Scandall Pro, which can be used with either of these.

The bundled software does take a while to get to grips with, but will do what most small businesses want, especially when you install the Kofax VRS Professional software supplied with it, which adds extra image-enhancement facilities.

Scandall Pro also offers PDF-creation tools, but a full copy of Adobe Acrobat 8 (Standard Edition) is included, along with a trial copy of Quickscan Pro from EMC. A much more professional scanning application, Quickscan Pro offers built-in optical character recognition (OCR) to generate editable text from scanned documents, plus custom despeckling, deskewing and other enhancement tools.

We preferred the EMC software to the free Scandall utility; however, you do only get a trial version and a full licence will cost £300 ex Vat or more when the trial expires.

A very smart-looking device, the Fujitsu fi-6230 is well constructed, lives up to the claims made for its performance and compares well on price against the competition. The bundled scanning software could be better, but that’s unlikely to be an issue for most buyers and is easily remedied if it is.

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