Fujitsu SP-1130N review: Souped-up scanning

Fujitsu’s SP series has long been a great choice for USB scanning – and now the SP-1130N ups the ante. It’s one of three new network-enabled models, along with the 1120N and 1125N, that offer the same speeds as their deskbound counterparts but add a Gigabit Ethernet port, giving you the freedom to locate the scanner where you want and drive it from any computer on the network.

Software-wise, all three stick with Fujitsu’s PaperStream IP software suite – and we’ve no complaints about that, as it offers a wealth of image-processing and scan-management features. Batch scanning in particular is made easy: you can create jobs that scan and process multi-page documents with a single click, and use barcode recognition or OCR zones for document separation or data extraction.

The SP-1130N on review is the fastest of the new models, citing a scan speed of 30ppm for both mono and colour scans at 300dpi. A claimed 4,500-page daily duty cycle shows it’s ready for high demand, and the automatic document feeder (ADF) has room for 50 pages, with a built-in ultrasonic sensor to detect paper jams and multi-feeds.

A single utility handles Windows host installation, offering the choice of USB or network port connections and loading the various PaperStream components. These include not only Fujitsu’s own software, but a custom version of ABBYY FineReader OCR, which adds options to export scans in a variety of Office document formats, or as searchable PDFs.

Also included is ABBYY FineReader 12 Sprint, which provides a simpler alternative to PaperStream Capture for quick scans, along with a system tray tool that lets you assign a defined action to the scanner’s start button. The package is rounded out by a network setup tool, and an agent that links up with Fujitsu’s free Scanner Central Admin web service for scanner fleet management.

This may all sound like a lot to take in, but setting up a scan profile is a simple wizard-driven process. You start by choosing colour, greyscale or mono output, then pick a resolution from 150 to 600dpi, specify a paper size and select single or double-sided scanning. Next, you set your scan destination, which might be a local folder, a network location, an FTP or SharePoint server, a printer or an email address. The one place you can’t scan to is cloud storage as Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Cloud app is only available with its iX series of scanners.

Document separation for large batch scans can be enabled too, using blank pages, page counts, predefined OCR zones, barcodes or Fujitsu’s patch codes. You can also tell the software to extract data from scanned documents by dragging a box around the area where you want zonal OCR to be applied; the information within can then be exported as a TXT, CSV or XML file.

Finally, it’s time to select any processing options you want applied, such as page rotation, image adjustment and clean up, deskewing, hole filling and blank page removal.

Once we’d got our profiles set up, we were pleased to find that performance fully lived up to Fujitsu’s promises. Our well-thumbed wad of 30 bank statements was scanned on both sides in 55 seconds, in greyscale and colour and at 200dpi and 300dpi. Factor in the five-second wait for each network scan to start and you’re looking at 30ppm precisely. As usual, switching to 600dpi causes speeds to tumble �� in this case to just over 8ppm – but you’ll very rarely need to use such a high resolution because output quality at 200pdi is absolutely fine for document archival purposes. OCR performance is similarly good, with text as small as 6pt on our test bank statements being captured accurately.

Nor did we hit any problems with paper handling. Our till receipts and thin waybills passed through the scanner without any jams, and on the rare occasion when two pages were picked up at once, the multi-feed detector immediately spotted the problem and stopped the scan before any pages were damaged.

If cloud features are important to you then you may need to look elsewhere, but Fujitsu’s SP-1130N delivers good performance and great output quality at a very reasonable price. Factor in the highly capable PaperStream IP software and this desktop scanner is a top contender for SMBs that are looking to soup up their scanning provision.

Fujitsu SP-1130N specifications