Fujitsu fi-800R review: Snappy scanning

If you’re seeking effortless passport and ID card scanning, the Fujitsu fi-800R will suit you down to the ground. Its ingenious design sucks an open passport in through a slot at the front, then ejects it the same way, so the bulk of the passport never needs to pass through the mechanism. Even better, it’s small enough to be kept at the front desk, so the customer’s passport need never leave their sight.

Don’t think of the fi-800R as solely a specialist scanner, though. With a 20-page ADF and an advertised 40ppm scan speed, it’s more than equal to everyday scanning tasks. And we can’t quibble with Fujitu’s performance claims: our sheaf of 20 bank statements was digitised at 41ppm at 200dpi and 300dpi, in both colour and greyscale. A clever motorised stacker keeps the space requirements down by holding scanned pages upright in front of the rear feeder, rather than spitting them out onto the desk.

Passport scanning, meanwhile, is wonderfully speedy, taking no more than three seconds to scan the personal information page from a standard EU passport – although Fujitsu recommends you take a moment to slip the passport into an optional protective sheet before feeding it in.

The scanner comes with Fujitsu’s full PaperStream IP software suite, comprising custom TWAIN and ISIS drivers, plus the PaperStream Capture image-processing app. As usual, this allows you to set up quick-access profiles that combine scan settings, destinations and various other options. A wizard walks you through the process of creating new profiles, meaning you can’t really go wrong, and there’s an impressive range of advanced features on offer, including image-processing options such as hole filling, blank page removal and automatic skew correction.

One part that particularly stands out is the software’s data-extraction module: alongside the familiar zonal OCR and barcode options, Fujitsu has also provided capture options specifically for passports, which can be used to automatically pull out and store key details such as the passport number, the holder’s date of birth and the country of issue.

Scans can be saved in a range of formats including JPEG, BMP and searchable PDF, while the included ABBY FineReader for ScanSnap plugin adds Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats too. If you want to try out extra features such as enhanced metadata fields, you can activate a 30-day trial of PaperStream Capture Pro, which costs £370 to fully license.

The last thing to configure is your scan destination. The software can scan to local or network folders, FTP and SharePoint servers, or make a photocopy by forwarding your scan directly to a printer. If you want to email a scan to someone, the software will open the local email app and attach the file, ready for you to fill in the dispatch details; cloud storage isn’t explicitly supported, but you can set up a profile that scans to a synchronised folder.

Once your profiles are configured, you simply need to click in the software to launch your desired type of scan. The scanner doesn’t have its own display, but its single physical button can also be bound to a nominated scan operation.

With its 20-page ADF, the fi-800R isn’t the perfect choice if you have a huge archive of documents to digitise, but its great performance, versatile software and space-saving design add up to a classy bundle that’s more flexible than you might assume.

Fujitsu fi-800R specifications