Fujitsu Ricoh FI 8170 – FI 8190 Review | Great scanner in 2023

Fujitsu Ricoh has launched the all new Ricoh FI 8170 scanner and the FI 8190 document scanner. These are part of a new approach to office scanning and are from the FI 8000 series family of scanners.

We test the Ricoh Fi 8170 and find out it comes out with a great approach for a new scanner, small and also relatively cheap. I think this could bring you closer to scanning for small office environments given the relatively low cost and also the small form factor.

What is new on the Ricoh FI 8170 and Fi 8190 scanners

First of all this is the first small document scanner with scanning capabilities and width over A4, but not really an all out A3 scanner. Fujitsu has studied the market and considers that there is a lot of documents to be scanned that are between those size, not as large as A3, but a bit larger than A4. I would say this is the first plus on this scanner, and it is a major proposition Fujitsu is coming out with.

Second thing I like is that the device is focused around network scanning. Let’s be honest, these days, if you are not doing production scanning, Ethernet is a must on any device. More people have to use the same device, therefore having the option to scan directly to different destinations is something we all love to do. Yes, more or less this is another digital sender, but a more updated one, to the needs of year 2022.

A third thing we like about this scanner is the variety of media you can scan. While most scanning will be done with conventional A4 paper, now you can directly pass through the device thicknesses ranging from 20 to 465 g/m² or 5.3 to 124 lb. This means a wide range of thick stock, with booklets up to 7mm. Yes, you heard it right, now you can scan a passport directly through the ADF.

Last but not least, we have the huge daily duty cycle for such a small device. You can easily process 10000 documents every day on the scanner, which means that you can mix days when you scan a couple of pages, with really busy days when you have to scan batches of thousands of documents.

Technical Specifications

We will take a look at the two scanners and see what they offer in terms of specifications. I will start with all the main things you would expect in a scanner like this and go to unique specifications that make them an interesting proposition.

Fujitsu Fi 8170 Technical Specifications

Let’s start with the main thing we all look at such a device, and that is scanning both sides of the paper at once. The FI 8170 will easily do this in one go, making it quite a productive device. Therefore, in terms of speed, you can expect a scanning speed of 70 pages per minute when working in simplex mode and a scanning speed of 140 pages when running in duplex mode. Now that is quite fast for an office device, and given that it has a range of about 10.000 documents per day, I would expect that to be easily matched by the device.

The daily duty cycle is definitely impressive, from my point of view. Scanning 10.000 documents every day was never an option before with such a small scanner. And this flexibility of using the device as a digital sender but also running thousands of documents when needed, iss definitely the biggest added value this scanner brings.

I would say besides the scanning volume, the scanner in general is designed to be a versatile workhorse. Fujitsu has looked at just about any issue that occurs relatively frequently and worked on it. For example the overscan control function is something that I can’t say is something I have though about before. But let’s be honest, how often you check each page of a thousand page document, whether the scanner has missed a smal part of the area of a document. This solves that, and allows you to scan and send, without focusing too much on such issues.

Fujitsu Fi 8190 Specs

This is the older brother of the FI 8170. It’s actually an 8170 on steroids, with faster scanning speeds and minimal technical improvements. The scanning speed has been increased to 90 pages per minute simplex and 180 in duplex mode. This is definitely a plus over the smaller brother, but does it really matter, besides in a spec war.

It’s better to focus on other functions the scanner actually offers, for example the CIC, clear image capture technology. This is something that we definitely think you will enjoy and see in practice. Just the fact that the images come out crisp and sharp, even when you sometimes forget to clean the scanning glass, it’s definitely something helpful.

Another thing which I really like is the control panel, with the rather small LCD screen. Yes, the screen is definitely too small for these times, but the button functions will allow you to access most settings which will be used in practice. We especially love the immediate switch from automatic to manual feed mode is something that speeds up the scanning of batches where documents are not homogenous. Plus, we can scan in that batch the odd thick document or even a card you have to scan from time to time.

Which one should you buy ?

There are not that many differences between the two devices. I would say besides the scan speed and maybe the expected daily volume, there isn’t much between the two of them.

If you do really scan a lot of documents, it will be worth it to you to spend a bit more and get the faster of the two scanners. When it is not the case, settling for the slower scanner will not really mean you are buying a sub par device. Just as with other Fujitsu scanners, you will be getting good scanning quality and reliability that in my opinion is top of the market.

Given that both work through ethernet, there isn’t much in this as well. So it all comes down to how much you are scanning, and what are the expected volumes. If you’re scanning significant volumes, the extra speed will probably add up in the end. If not, you will be more than satisfied with the FI 8170, the so called “slower” model.