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SCANNERS
When Fujitsu introduces a new
scanner it is not just to meet
a perceived business need but
also to encourage greater uptake
of scanning in general. In this
context, what are we to make of
the new SP Series of 20-30 pages
per minute scanners?
On the face of it, the SP Series
(SP1120/1125/1130) is something
of a throwback. It has a simple,
austere design and a clearly defined,
limited feature set that has more
in common with devices from 10
years ago than today’s multi-purpose
scanners – albeit it with state-of-
the-art paper-handling and Fujitsu’s
PaperStream IP driver.
Klaus Schulz, Manager Product
Marketing EMEA at Fujitsu subsidiary
PFU (EMEA) Ltd, says that unlike the
increasingly versatile ScanSnap and
fi Series scanners, the SP Series has
been introduced to perform one task,
and one task only – the scanning
of documents into a professional
digital archive, which remains most
people’s starting point for scanning.
“It is built for a specific purpose
and should be purchased for a specific
purpose, and not for populating multiple
repositories or applications,” he said.
“What we understand from
non-systematic users of document
scanners in business environments
is that they have digital archives
that they populate with digitally
born documents. But they also have
analogue archives, and they might be
at the point where they understand
that it makes sense to convert the
analogue archive into a digital state
in order to have all information
accessible from one single source,”
he said.
Simple by design
Schulz says that in this respect the
SP Series bucks the trend of recent
years in which each new ScanSnap
or fi Series scanner has had greater
functionality and arguably more
complexity than the one before.
“This approach has worked well
in developing and migrating existing
users – larger enterprise users, as
well as knowledgeable resellers – to
the point where they are comfortable
and confident that they can actually
gain efficiency in their routines
and their day-to-day work through
document scanning – feeding
documents not only into traditional
digital archives but also, as part of
a routine, into different repositories
and applications,” he said.
However, Schulz argues that some
users have been left behind by this
tendency, particularly in small and
medium-sized businesses with 5-50
employees and limited in-house IT
expertise or resources.
“The fi Series or ScanSnap IX 500
have become very sophisticated and
provide a wealth of capabilities. If
we talk about these with someone
who has just started to become
interested in digitising their paper
documents, there is a risk they will
be overwhelmed by the diversity of
functionality on offer. That’s when we
came up with the idea of going back
to the roots of document scanning,
to what we did as an industry 5-10
years back,” he said.
“Ten years ago, when we introduced
the fi Series, a desktop scanner did
nothing more than sheet feed batches
of documents and digitise them in
order to provide them to some kind of
professional document archive facility.
Nothing other than that. Period.”
With the SP Series, Schulz
says Fujitsu is marrying that level
of simplicity with advances in
hardware and software, notably a
professional mechanism for feeding
mixed batches including plastic ID
cards; OCR software; and Fujitsu’s
new PaperStream IP driver, which
improves scan image quality and
productivity through the use of
standard or custom scanning profiles.
“We are combining the high
quality and reliability of today’s
desktop document scanners with
what we introduced one and a half
years ago on the software driver
side, with PaperStream IP, to provide
a very reliable high quality digital
image producer for digital archive
population,” he said.
Upgrade path
Schulz adds that PaperStream IP
also provides a seamless upgrade
path as users become more
confident with scanning technology.
“As soon as a business starts
systematically scanning and merging
analogue and digital archives, they
start building experience and over
time they realise they could do more
of benefit to their business routines/
processing routines than simply
populating that digital archive,”
he said.
Because the SP Series has
the same PaperStream IP driver
capabilities as the fi Series,
businesses can easily upgrade to
an fi Series or install a mixture of SP
Series and fi scanners. They could
even create a scanning profile and
export it to an fi scanner so that
users don’t have to change their
scanning habits in any way.
Personal filing
One anomaly considering the
positioning of the SP Series as a
dedicated archiving scanner is the
inclusion of Presto! PageManager,
alongside PaperStream IP and ABBYY
FineReader12 Sprint (OCR) software.
This personal filing and organisation
software, with what Fujitsu calls a
‘personal document editing cockpit’,
clearly has no value for professional
archiving, and in that sense is
superfluous. However, Schulz says
that by enabling a user to group and
combine scanned pages and drag
and drop thumbnails into different
applications and routines, it fulfils
Fujitsu’s wider mission to increase
office workers’ familiarity with, and
confidence in, scanning.
Fujitsu has
gone back to
basics with its
new SP Series
scanners
Back to the future
