PFU Ricoh Fujitsu FI 7600 | We have tested this scanner in 2023

The PFU Ricoh Fujitsu Fi 7600 scanner is still one of the scanners that we really enjoy working on. Even after 5 years on the market, we still use our Fi7600 on a day to day basis. My colleagues love the thing because it’s easy to operate and we love the thing because it does not have high running costs. 

So what we did was to test the device again, and see how it stacks up with the demands of the current era of scanning. Mind you, the drivers and software have evolved, but luckily, PFU still supports this device with regular updates. We really love that.

Technical Specifications of the FI 7600

Well, we are not the biggest fans of specs. Actually, we prefer to run the equipment in real life scenarios and see how it actually performs. The FI7600 is no stranger to our practice, as the specs are not really the most impressive out there. But where it might lack in specs, it makes up in real life. Especially given the size of the scanner, I don’t know many A3 scanners that can perform like this one and still be relatively small. 

Test results for the FI 7600 Scanner

We will break down in the following paragraphs the results of our tests for the PFU Ricoh FI 7600. Some of the elements we will be looking at are the scanning area, speed in practice versus in theory and also elements of the drivers or software. 

Scanning area

As you have already seen, the Fujitsu is an A3 scanner, so you can expect to scan an area of 297 by 420mm. This is of course true, but in all honesty, these numbers don’t say much. So we went ahead and did 3 separate tests, which include strictly A4 batches, A3 batches and mixed documents.

The A4 batches went as expected. We prefer to scan landscape because this increases the scanning speed, as documents travel on their shorter side through the scanner. The Adf accommodates A4 documents quite well, even in landscape mode, so no worries here. We usually run with a maximum scanning size and auto crop, but that will decrease the overall scanning speed. So what we did, we set A4 for the A4 batches in our test. As expected everything went well.

A3 is a different animal. You can only put them in landscape mode and you can go a bit over A3 width, 304.8mm to be more precise. This is the actual scanning area, but to pass through the scanner, you can actually maybe scan documents that are even a bit bigger than that. But the scanner itself will only capture up to 304.8mm. Rather from what I saw in our tests, this is conditioned by the driver.

The 3rd things to test were the mixed sized batches. This included A3, A4 and everything under A4 and in between. As expected, we did have to prepare the documents for scanning, and make sure everything is in the center. You can actually get away sometimes by running a mixed scanning mode, I would not call it manual, but I would not call it automatic. You just feed documents manually, and the scanner seems to know when you’re doing that. In our test we did both, and in the end after 1000 documents, times were not that different. We had to stop the scanning when running automatic mode, as we had to recenter the documents. In that time, although a bit more difficult for the operator, feeding documents by hand led to more or less the same time.

Scanning Speed

The scanning speed of the FI 7600 is good but not something you might be overly impressed with. We think that these days 100ppm is something to be expected from a production A3 scanner. But while this might seem average, they way the scanner can run all day at the rated speed is quite impressive nonetheless. 

So, if you want to scan at 100pm you should place your A4 documents in landscape mode. That is what we did with the test batch and it worked like a charm. Mind you, the scanner was set to A4 size, so there was no need to process the scans and crop to A4 during the process. This is a little trick you can use to make sure you hit the rated speed time after time. 

When we tested the A3 batch, the speed dropped by 50%, but this is to be expected, given that an A3 is double the size of an A4 page. But in all fairness, the pickup speed was good and for A3 scanning we can really recommend this device. Plus the paper handling is great so you won’t get many scanning errors, which would decrease your overall productivity. 

For the mixed bacth we ran, speed was ok, mind you the auto size feature will decrease the overall productivity, given that the driver has to calculate and crop each document to its size. Also, you can expect more scanning errors, given that you have to make sure documents are aligned correctly on the middle. 

ADF Capacity

The scanner will hold around 300 sheets in the document feeder. While this may not seem impressive, we tested and for small batches this was enough. But I guess if you are scanning all day and you have relatively large batches, it might frustrate you a bit. And my colleague testing the thing was a bit frustrated about this. But I then showed him something really interesting, which was to load documents while the device is scanning.

At first he did not find this too easy, but after 5-6 tries, he really loved this aspect. I thought at one point he was just loading small batches on purpose, to load while scanning. So yes, this is an interesting approach, given that the capacity is smaller than that of its competitors. It’s especially interesting for A3 documents, given that these tend to be a bit more difficult to manage, so we always recommend loading smaller batches. 

Paper Stream IP driver

We always say Fujitsu has the best scanner driver available for any document scanner on the market. I would say it’s just as good as Kofax VRS, and it comes free with any FI scanner. What we love about it is that first of all the settings are pretty clear for everyone to understand. The second aspect we love is that every change be previewed and tested, and unlike the VRS, you will always have the live preview and revert. Last but not least, it’s easy to understand how to save and select the profiles to interact with Paper Stream Capture.

So for this, we tested the things that I think are really interesting in the driver. For example the image mode, as in selecting between BW, Grayscale, Color or even Automatic Color Detection. For our office documents, we used the Automatic Color Detection to test and see how many it gets wrong. Out of 130 pages, none were wrong. Although there was enough color or total lack of color on the pages, which might have influenced this a bit. Still, I think the results were good enough.

Another thing I really like is the image mode. You can go with automatic for office documents, which we also did in our test. The driver tends to calculate dynamically what is required to output the best looking image. And it tends to do this just fine on office documents. We did have some issues with documents that had satelite terrain images. These were construction documents and from what we saw it does the correction in an aggressive manner. Somehow the images look very bad after the correction, beyond comprehension. So if you have batches with images, this can be corrected using the normal image mode, where the threshold is fixed.

Paper Stream Capture scanning software

PFU Ricoh offers 2 solutions for the capturing software. The first is the basic and free version of Paper Stream Capture software. This is probably more than enough for most scanning requirements. In our test we also used this as it will be the main choice for most of the users of this scanners.

The main takeaways from our test were as follows:

• Ease of use – The software is intuitive. What I did was to choose a colleague of mine with no experience in the software itself. I asked him to configure the scanning destinations and play with the profiles a bit. He managed to successfully configure these from the get go. Yes, he does have scanning experience but no experience with this software. He compared it to the Canon software and he says this is definitely night and day better. 
• Indexing features are great on this device. Even with the standard software, you can easily capture fields, although you are limited to the number of fields you can capture. You can integrate these into the name of the files and folders or you can export a CSV file with these details. Especially for more advanced users this is good to know. Our test batch included the batch date and also the field capture in the naming, which was actually a unique code for each of the documents we scanned. 
• The OCR feature is also good to have although this will consume a lot of memory and might take a bit to finish the processing. Luckily, we were able to scan while waiting for the files to be output.

Should you buy the Fujitsu Fi-7600 scanner in 2023?

Well, the answer is still clearly yes. This is a great scanner, filled with functions and feature that will make your life easier during the scanning process. We were able to highlight some of the functions we really loved about it and we will try to let you know which ones impressed us the most. 

The ADF is great as in the scanner runs face down so you can load it while scanning. You can’t imagine how useful this function is until you have it. In our test we insisted on this aspect and my colleagues once again highlighted how convenient it is in real life. Even if the capacity is limited to 300 sheets, this function makes the capacity less relevant.

We love how small and light the scanner is. If you compare it to the average A4 scanner, you will say it’s quite big. But don’t forget this is an A3 production scanner, so given the dimensions, it’s great to have a scanner that you can move around quite easily, but still process a lot of documents with it.

Last but not least, we love the Paper Stream IP driver and the Capture software. These work hand in hand, and given that they are offered for free by Fujitsu, they are a real gem. Yes, the free version is not on par with Kofax Express or Alaris Capture Pro, but considering that the price difference is huge, you can still buy the Paperstream Capture Pro and spend way less than you would for the other two.