IT Pro Verdict
With lower volume scanners such as Canon's £2,400 ImageFormula DR-6030C built to handle 10,000 operations a day, you need to be serious about scanning to justify the extra investment in such a heavy duty device. However, where there's a proven need for a robust, quick and reliable production scanner the fi-6800 is competitively priced and more than up to the job.
The fi-6800 sits almost at the top of Fujitsu's range of production and departmental scanners, second only to the 14,000 fi-5950. It's a mid-volume A3 production scanner with all of the features that would suggest including a considerable price tag. That said, it's cheaper than two of its principle competitors: Canon's range-topping DR-X10C and Kodak's i4600.
Like most document scanners the fi-6800's maximum 600dpi optical resolution is nothing special, but it's capable of impressive speeds. Fujitsu quotes a maximum 100 A4 pages per minute (ppm) in portrait orientation and 130ppm for landscape when scanning simplex. With considerable onboard processing and memory, duplex jobs should be as fast you could scan all 260 sides of 130 A4 pages in a minute. The fi-6800 can handle media weights from as low as 20gsm up to 209gsm, and sizes from A8 up to A3, with custom support for long media of up to three metres.
As you'd expect from a device designed to process around 60,000 scans per day, the fi-6800 is built from very heavy duty plastics, mounted onto a metal chassis. It's surprisingly compact for such a well specified scanner, but at 32 kilograms it's far heavier than it looks. At the front is a 500-page paper chute that folds out and extends to fully contain A3 paper, while the output tray also has an extending paper support. Both feel strong enough to cope with the weight of a ream and are motorised to keep the geometry of the paper path consistent as a scan progresses.
