Review

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 12 No 04 - Jul/Aug 2004

The medium volume scanner market has become a difficult place to trade over the last few years.

The medium volume scanner market has become a difficult place to trade over the last few years. Where once there were fairly inflexible dividing lines between suppliers, with each sticking to their most fruitful target market, recently the industry has grown, and shows no sign of slowing in that growth. Demand for document management solutions also continues to grow, driven by commercial considerations, increased regulation and legislation, and a general desire (in the aftermath of Enron and others) for more efficient records management. At the same time we are not seeing any decrease in volumes of paper being generated, copied, and re-copied within our offices. As one DM software vendor recently commented: “We will see the paperless toilet before we see a paperless office.”
Fujitsu has had to be very nimble to keep its leading position in the scanner market. For a long time they had the middle market pretty well sewn up, while others focused on the high volume production sector or the low-end departmental/single user scanner. But competitors have moved from both directions to try to squeeze Fujitsu’s market share. In a world where scanners are increasingly seen as almost a commodity purchase, it is getting harder and harder to differentiate one new model from another. Not so with the fi-5750C!
Developed from the successful fi-4750C, the new scanner offers support for documents from business card size right up to 12” by 18” on both the flatbed and the 200-sheet ADF, and thus can handle a wide variety of document types, quickly and efficiently. The ADF actually handles sheets up to a massive 12” by 34”. But this is not the major unique of the fi-5750C. It has what Fujitsu describe as an ‘ergonomic ADF’: the feeder can rotate through 180° via a turntable type mechanism, making it, say Fujitsu, as easy to operate for left-handed as right-handed users. As a right-handed person myself, I have never had reason to consider how difficult it might be for a left-hander to operate devices like scanners, but clearly, with it affecting around one in ten of the population, this could be a significant issue – especially in large operations such as service bureaux, where optimum operational speeds are crucial. Fujitsu’s strap-line for the new machine is: “Because the office revolves around the scanner, we’ve made a scanner that revolves around the office.” In addition, the ADF can be positioned in the middle of the flatbed (indeed must be set thus to be rotated for left-hand use). This change gives the scanner a smaller overall footprint, which again might appeal in certain environments. The physical act of rotating the ADF is a job that takes just a few moments – but users must be careful to put the stacker tray in the upright position first, to avoid possible damage. That said, the overall impression this scanner gives is one of considerable sturdiness, as is usual for Fujitsu’s medium/high volume devices – you’re not left with the feeling that, if you did choose to rotate the ADF once in a while, something would eventually break!
Fujitsu admit that this feature, while unusual, is unlikely to encourage huge additional sales in its own right. Fortunately for them, as well as being unusually flexible, the fi-5750C is extremely fast and reliable. It can scan pages in full colour at a very respectable 110 ipm (duplex) at 300 dpi.
The improved feeding technology makes short work of poor quality documents, including ultra-thin paper, while special image enhancement tools ensure that users get the best possible image every time. With its new feeding mechanism the fi-5750C is capable of automatically and reliably feeding mixed paper batches ranging from very thin up to very thick paper. This capability minimises the need for operator intervention to eliminate paper jams or to prepare paper in uniformly sized batches –a gain likely to appeal in service bureaux and other high volume environments.
Since the fi-5750C's feeding mechanism picks the paper from the bottom of the paper stack, the operator can continuously feed the paper even while the scanner is operating, thereby optimising scanner (and operator) productivity. The scanner's automatic length detection senses the end of the document and eliminates excess white space when scanning batches of mixed-length documents, while infrared document double-feed detection simplifies the batch scanning process.
At 27” x 20” x 13” (width x depth x height), the fi-5750C is by no means a compact scanner, but neither is it too large for a typical office environment. Feeling very similar to the 4750 it replaces, it weighs around 35 kilos, which in practice may be a little too heavy to be easily moved by one person - but with its rotating ADF this machine shouldn’t really need to be moved during normal use.

Features summary:

High speed scanning at high resolution
• USB 2 or SCSI
• 30ppm A4 Landscape at 600dpi
• 55ppm/110ipm A4 Portrait at 300dpi
• Daily duty cycle of up to 8,000 documents per day

Superior paper Handling
• Ultrasonic multi feed and page length detection
• De-skew & auto-cropping (TWAIN & ISIS driver)
• Straight paper path for reliability and easy maintenance

Ergonomic ADF
• ADF position selectable: ‘traditional’ or central for smaller footprint
• ADF direction: selectable for left-handed/right-handed users

Image quality
• Simplified Windows-based scanner control panel
• Optical resolution 600dpi
• 3 colour CCD image sensors
• Selectable background (black or white)
• Image Processing Software (optional)
• User selectable colour drop-out (red, green or blue)
• Full version of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 included in bundle

More info: www.fel.fujitsu.com

Verdict: Don’t assume that the fi-5750C is a gimmicky device because of the ‘left-handed ADF’ feature: this is a very attractive machine in terms of cost/performance, and will undoubtedly be a big success with right-handers too!
 

Review