A professional document scanner is a scanner that offers more than the basic. You need advanced scan profiles, things like zonal data extraction, a high scanning speed and extreme reliability. We researched through more than 100 document scanners to determine which would be the best to use
Here are our 3 favorite professional document scanners:
Here are our 3 favorite professional document scanners:
Product | Format | Scanning area | Connectivity | Sheets per minute | Images per minute | ADF Size | Daily Duty Cycle | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Our choice 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 |
Raven Pro Document Scanner | A4 | 8.5 in. x 11.7 in. | Wi-Fi (2.4ghz), Ethernet | 60 | 120 | 100 sheets | 6000 sheets | Click for more info |
Canon DR-6010C | A4 | 8.27 in x 11.69 in | USB 2.0 and SCSI-3 | 60 | 120 | 100 sheets | 7,500 sheets | Click for more info |
Let’s have a look at each product in particular.
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 |
There is an automatic document feeder ADF tray with a capacity of 80 pages and with a scan speed of 60 pages every minute, the ADF tray will be entirely scanned in just under 1 and a half minutes.
The PaperStream IP software is what makes this really professional. It comes with a host of features. It can output scanned images in multiple file formats like JPEG, TIFF (including CCIT-G4), PNG, BMP Bitmap, etc. This is something the next scanner although very good, can’t do yet. Then there are special features like Multistream which helps you scan with multiple profiles, Barcode recognition to help you separate different batches of documents and also Zonal OCR for more advanced data extraction applications. The optical character recognition module is built into the PaperStream Capture app and is able to convert high-quality images to searchable PDF files.
The manufacturer recommends a daily scanning volume of no more than 4,000 sheets every day on this professional document scanner. That accounts to just about an hour of continuous scanning. It is equipped with a multifeed sensor which uses ultrasonic technology to detect if more than one sheet of paper has been fed into the device and also a sensor for paper length detection.
It also has fairly durable feed rollers which only need to be replaced after you’ve scanned 200,000 documents.
This professional scanner comes with an image resolution of 1200 dpi from a CCD sensor. This is a higher pixel density than you would normally get from a document scanner or a production scanner.
You can use the scanner with ISIS and TWAIN drivers, so that you can scan directly into 3rd party scanning and image processing apps. The drivers on the website work on both the major operating systems: Windows 10 and Mac OS X.
This scanner is not just about specs, it was launched years ago and it still has a 4.5 rating on Amazon which only comes to prove what we talked about here.
Raven Pro Document Scanner
Product | Format | Scanning area | Connectivity | Sheets per minute | Images per minute | ADF Size | Daily Duty Cycle | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Raven Pro Document Scanner | A4 | 8.5 in. x 11.7 in. | Wi-Fi (2.4ghz), Ethernet | 60 | 120 | 100 sheets | 6000 sheets | Click for more info |
What is great is that you can connect it to the Internet, your local network and PC through 2.4 Ghz Wi-fi Wireless connection, Ethernet and through a USB port and USB cable. This is the most you can hope for in any professional document scanner. There is another bonus, the USB port can be used to scan directly to USB flash drives.
The first thing that you notice about the scanner before reading any specs is its beautiful 7″ LCD touchscreen. It makes working with the scanner very easy, you can do things like cropping or rotating the layout of the document you just scanned right from the scanner itself. And it is not limited to that, mostly anything that you would have done on your Windows PC or Mac in relation to the scanner, you can do it directly on the device.
It doesn’t have 1200 dpi, just the usual 600 dots per inch digital image resolution. The daily scanning volume that is recommended by the manufacturer is 6000 digital scans per day. Another difference is that it uses a CIS (Contact Image Sensor) rather than a CCD.
You can scan directly to the Cloud and it doesn’t get easier as with this scanner. Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, OneDrive, all the integrations are there and you can also store it on the Raven Cloud where you also get an OCR feature to convert documents.
This is a great professional scanner and what makes it even greater is that the firmware is continuously updated and the scanner downloads the firmware on its own.
Canon DR-6010C
Product | Format | Scanning area | Connectivity | Sheets per minute | Images per minute | ADF Size | Daily Duty Cycle | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Canon DR-6010C | A4 | 8.27 in x 11.69 in | USB 2.0 and SCSI-3 | 60 | 120 | 100 sheets | 7,500 sheets | Click for more info |
For connecting the device to your PC, you can do it via USB cable but also via an SCSI-3 port. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. It is a very specific high-speed cable that used to be on fast Hard-Drives and then was ported to be an external port. ISIS and TWAIN drivers are found on the product’s website.
What we like is the Kofax VRS that it uses with which you can do live adjustments of the images as you scan them and offers background removal, deskew, cropping features and so many automatic improvements at a level that you don’t get with other software.
This is a great professional scanner for documents but bear in mind the price is 3 times higher than of the other two.
Which professional document scanner to buy?
Out of all these professional scanners, our favorite is the Fi-7160 for its advanced features that put it in a class of its own and the Raven for its multitude of features and easy-to-use interface. The Canon is a great professional scanner, but the price is much higher.
Our Score