Saturday, April 20, 2013

Why does the Fujitsu iX500 document scanner need a computer?

For the past decade I've used a typical corporate document scanner. These are the big brothers of the home "MFC" - laser printer, copier, scanner, fax machine. The scanner produces PDF images on an internal hard drive. You can adjust resolution and page size from a control panel, but really all we ever do is scan to 8.5x11 PDF archive resolution.

It's old tech. So why can't I buy a decent document scanner that produces 600DPI 8.5x11 PDFs without an attached computer? In particular, since Fujitsu seems to rule the home document scanning world, why does the ix500 still require an attached computer? This isn't rocket science.

Brother did something like this on a home MFC back in 2009, but I can't find anything on it today.

This is so weird. Is there a patent problem?

It's driving me daft.

See also

4 comments:

  1. Honestly, I don't care, I need the power of Adobe Acrobat to improve and OCR my scans anyway … :)

    Your question is on the other hand fully understandable … and a standalone document scanner would be very useful at home. At the moment, I scan all my private documents at the office and that's less than ideal of course.

    Do you know by chance if the ix500 got a better document feeder than the S1500? In the S1500 feeder, documents often lean to the front (because they arrived folded in half) and I have to push them back by hand. Paper jams occur too often as well …

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Martin -- I saw this comment but not the notification. So now I have to figure out where they are going. Maybe into spam, but I rely more on the RSS feed to let me know.

    Google seems kind of broken these days.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Our app.net colleagues did say the ix500 feeder is nicely improved over the S1500, which was itself MUCH better than the s1300.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Durability might still be an issue. Most reviews are based on only cursory testing if at all … I would like to know how the ix500 feeder copes with 15'000 scanned pages.

    I had originally planned to buy a S1300 for home use but it was not convincing enough. I am also still skeptical about the ix500 – the S1500 gets still successfully sold at almost the same price …

    ReplyDelete