Fujitsu FI-7700 Production Scan, PA03740-B005

Too big and bulky. We use this scanner at our dealership and honestly need a whole desk just to fit somewhere. I have used my small desk scanner and that works just fine for scanning bulk documents. Feel like this one is a waste of money over $4k? Enormous price ..enormous size. Hate it.

I'm almost completely happy with this, my 7th scanner purchase. I've come from a long line of almosts and nearly-theres with my previous scanners, when it comes to capacity, ease of use, image quality, noise, paper handling, and speed. My first few scanners were the cheap, single-user type, not possessing ADFs for any really competent document handling, but doing fine with individual photographs and magazine captures. Those were followed by an HP Scanjet 8290, which offered fair image quality at best, and suffered from way too many ADF misfeeds. Next came a Fujitsu fi-5220C, which had better images, more speed, and more competent ADF work, but was much less user-friendly, and more laborious in its required user input per scan. Then I had an HP N9120 (bought in 2011 - not the Enterprise Flow model that they're selling in 2018). It was faster still, and had easier-to-use software than the older Fujitsu, but was beset by constantly-roaring fan(s) that were so loud that they made my tinnitus act up (so I literally learned to wear ear protection when using it), had only mediocre image quality, and again, constant ADF misfeeds. And I do mean constant; I would have to stand there, helping to apply downward pressure on underlying pages, to keep them from constantly being grabbed two-or-three-at-a-time. Every scan, every day. When I turned up the acquisition resolution to help it achieve higher-quality images, it would tend to halt with out-of-memory errors. Finally, I ended up keeping it far longer than I wanted to simply because it weighs 83 lb. This Fujitsu was far more expensive, way more even than the HP N9120 - expensive enough that a SOHO user such as myself has to stop and think long and hard over such a purchase (even if the new tax laws still let you write it off). But if you still have to work with a lot of paper documents, like I do, and sometimes need a big flatbed too, I can't recommend this fi-7700 enough. It is ENORMOUSLY more competent than any of my prior scanners in the REALLY KEY area of ADF paper handling, and its capacity, image quality and speed are truly impressive - yet it remains silent when not actually in the physical act of scanning. No loud fans here; indeed, no fans at all. And it has such a sophisticated ADF paper handling mechanism that I have not had one single misfeed yet. At all. One star off for software that still needs work. As anyone who has installed more than an entry-level scanner knows, installation is a real pain in the *ss, and it takes a long time - at least several hours of trial and error, experimenting with software settings, to get usable results. While their "ScanSnap Manager" is truly excellent and easy to use, it sometimes misses that a page is upside down, and will therefore leave the text upside down in the output file. The included PaperStream Capture (I just use the Basic variant, which is all I need; Enterprise users will want to use the included free one-year trial of PaperStream Capture Pro) does a better job of recognizing an upside down page and automatically flipping it over in the output file, but is more tedious software to use overall, requiring more user input with each scan, and doesn't allow one-touch convenient use of the "Scan" button on the scanner itself. If I'm not using ScanSnap Manager, then any time I press the scanner's Scan button, I get a popup on the computer screen, asking me which software I meant to use. Finally, the PaperStream Error Recovery Guide software seems inherently flawed. I installed the software packages on my Office PC and on a work laptop, both running Windows 10 64-bit. In either computer, the Error Recovery Guide's tray applet reports nothing - merely "No information on the scanner hardware status. Page count: Error." And when I go to restart or shut down a PC, I get a Windows message that "The following programs are preventing your PC from restarting/shutting down," with Error Recovery Guide being the culprit on both computers. I learned how to do a Windows Registry tweak to turn off that "preventing shutdown" screen from appearing. If you don't need a flatbed, but if you're paper-handling requirements mean that you are still willing to pay for such an excellent, professional ADF mechanism, they make a somewhat less expensive model, the fi-7600. On the other hand, I see that there are also models further up in their line that cost many times more, and only have ADFs as well; this seems to be their top-model flatbed.