Best Baseball Card Scanner | #1 is for any sport card in 2023

Fujitsu fi-7160

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Fujitsu fi-7160	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	USB 3.0	60	120	80 sheets	4,000 sheets	Click for more info

Let’s start with the FI 7160 and see how it performs. First thing first, we took a regular card, around 250gsm and ran it through the scanner. It actually moved quite well, the scanner did what it was supposed to do. Nothing to complain about here.

The second card we took was a bit thicker and laminated. The pickup rolls played with it a bit and then it managed to move them through the scanner. A colleague of mine had a good idea and recommended we clean the rolls with a special roll cleaner we use. The movement became much smoother and it went through the scanner perfectly.

Such a solution will work but given the laminated nature of the card, I guess it gathers more dirt and lint on it, and probably you will have to clean the rollers a bit more often than usual.

Now to the image quality. The first card had a matt finish which means the image quality was as expected. Fujitsu is well known for the quality of the CCD so I would not expect anything less.

Regarding the glossy laminated card, I was really impressed that it came out very good as well. I would have expected it to come out with slight reflections but it was not the case. One option I do recommend is the normal image mode, don’t run it in automatic mode.

There are risks when you are doing that because the driver will try to optimize each image. It will work well with office documents, but cards are a different animal, so run the normal mode, or even the bright mode if images are a bit dark. As long as you are working with a fixed threshold on the image mode, the results should be perfect.

Panasonic KV-S5055C

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Panasonic KV-S5055C	A3	11.69 in x 16.54 in	USB 3.0	80	160	200 seets	300 sheets	Click for more info

You probably already know our bias towards CCD-capturing units. It’s not that CIS is bad, but especially for scanning sports cards, we want the perfect image quality.

The Panasonic KV-S5055C is the only scanner from Panasonic to offer a CCD unit. That is why we included it in our test and we thought about it as a good scanner for sport cards.

Compared to the Fujitsu, I must say the biggest difference is the paper path. While the Fujitsu is a face down scanner, this is face up, which means you have to put the stack of cards in the ADF facing up.

This means that in the real world, the card will enter the scanner and come back out 180 degrees, which means it will have to rotate during the process.

Luckily, with the regular card, it seems to go through the scanner quite well. We had no issues, the pick up rolls did a good job at feeding it through the scanner, and things went really smoothly. I actually took a batch of 10 similar cards and ran them 3 times. No problems whatsoever.

With the laminated one, I was expecting to have more issues. It went perfectly through the scanner, and the feeding mechanism worked brilliantly. So i went and got a larger batch of laminated cards and tried again.

Here things changed and what I noticed is the same thing as with the Fujitsu. I had to clean the rollers at regular intervals and the process would run quite well.

What is interesting on this, and especially for cards, is the ImageCapture Plus software. There is a feature when you save the documents after scanning, that is very intuitive to scan to different folders. It would not work for large batches of documents, but for card scanning it’s just brilliant.

Fujitsu fi-7460

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Fujitsu fi-7460	A3	11.69 in x 16.54 in	USB 3.0	60	120	100 sheets	9,000 sheets	Click for more info

We also wanted to test the FI 7460, but we only included it because it also allows you to scan A3 documents. So you would think why on earth would it make any sense to buy it for sports cards?

Well, the guy that sent us the cards for testing, and we thanked him for it, also told us he collects posters of baseball and basketball players. We did not think much at first but we asked him if this is a regular thing among collectors. He told us that pretty much everyone he knows has these, so we asked him to send some samples of those.

Scanning results were similar to the Ricoh Fujitsu FI 7160. We did notice something different though, because the Ricoh 7460 is A3, the feeding mechanism is slightly different to accommodate for bigger documents. What this means is that it feeds both the laminated and the regular cards easier. It did require the same amount of cleaning, but it just felt that the feeding was smoother and easier.

Now, back to the posters, these were folded A3 posters. We ran them through the scanner with the normal image mode and the results were pretty impressive. I then went on and tried the bright mode, which I sometimes prefer, especially when we scan documents with pictures. We got to this because some customers were of the opinion the images were a bit dark, and that’s how we discovered the bright mode.

The images had good quality, they were a bit brighter than on the paper, but all in all the colors were matching and the cards looked really well on screen.

Alaris Kodak i2900

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Alaris Kodak i2900	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	USB 2.0	60	120	250 sheets	10,000 sheets	Click for more info

The last unit we wanted to include is the i2900 from Alaris Kodak. This is a neat little scanner and comes with the famous imaging functions from Kodak. The capturing unit is CCD which means you can expect scanning accuracy and relatively good color matching.

But the reason we included this unit is that it also has a flatbed unit attached to it. This is really important given that there will be some cards, especially really thick stock or premium cards with embossed elements, which won’t go through the ADF unit.

So for this device, we focused solely on the flatbed unit. We got our hands on some really rare ( and very expensive ) embossed baseball cards. For example, in one case, all the caps of the players were embossed, almost 1mm in thickness. Even if it might have gone through the ADF, there would have been a risk of damage to them.

So we scanned it on the flatbed unit and looked at it. Because this is a ccd unit, the scanner was able to output everything pretty much on focus. I did see some weird small shadows around the cap, but it was nothing critical. It looked perfectly fine and I was really satisfied with the result.

I then tried a really thick laminated card, which definitely would have not worked automatically. The results were near perfect, there was no gloss feel or reflections in the image. It was just perfect and was really happy with the result.