Home > Consumer Reviews > Fujitsu ScanPartner FI-4120C Color Duplex Scanner

Easy to set up and use and what a difference duplex scanning makes - the scanner eats up the pages. I was able to format a size for cancelled checks and scan them one at a time - the scanner automatically scans the back and places the scans in order ( probably with the help of the Adobe program, but it was easy) This scanner replaces a Fujitsu 620C sheetfed and flatbed scanner and quite honestly is so much faster and easier to use. It takes up no space on a desktop - especially compared to the old scanner. I would recommend it to anyone.

Better than I hoped; a great scanner. It's about the size of a toaster, so I keep it on my desk between dual monitors and scan in client letters, invoices, receipts, reports etc. It's let me move my consulting business to a 'paperless office', saving lots of find-the-paper-file time.

It's fast and easy, and in almost 3 months and 10,000 pages I've had no mechanical problems. (I chose this model because many newsgroup posters said it was business-level reliable.)

Flies through 18 - 19 one-bit black and white pages per minute at 300 dpi - wow. (300 dpi is plenty for archiving and OCR page recognition software.) Is quite a bit slower at higher dpis - about 8 pages per minute at 400. Goes up to 600 dpi.

100 dpi color scanning is quick but 300 dpi color is quite slow, about 2 pages per minute. The rate limiting step seems to be data transfer, not the scanner itself.

Duplex scanning - both sides at once - is wonderful, with lots of uses I didn't foresee.

Comes (Jan 2004) with Adobe Acrobat 5.0, which works fine. Upgrade to Acrobat Standard 6.0 was then just $100 and Acrobat Pro just $150. They sell normally at $300 and $450. A big savings. Acrobat 6 has built in page recognition - scan the page, and Acrobat will OCR it so you can search and cut and past text.

THE DRIVER SOFTWARE IS POOR. My version (Jan 2004) shipped with a driver that was two iterations out of date, and couldn't handle color scans on Win XP. Blue scanned in as green, etc. Useless. Tech support was friendly but evasive: "Reinstall your _other_ software", for eg. Yeah, right. Figuring out myself to download and install the latest driver fixed the color problem - except now it supports only 24-bit color, not 8-bit, which is unacceptable, I think, since mechanically the scanner will do 8-bit and 24 bit files are way big.

Also the scanner-driver has lots and lots of buttons and settings - good. But few of the settings are obvious, and the user's guide, which was written in Japanese, translated into Serbo-Croatian, then into Eskimo, and finally into English, is often undecipherable. Not much point having an SDTC Variance DTC Variance slider if you don't know what SDTC Variance DTC Variance is.

Still, if you're archiving business correspondence, reports, etc, the standard settings work fine, and the thing is a reliable little duplex speed demon.

I have used this scanner in my office for over a year with zero problems. It's fast, quiet, and efficient. And it does a great job with both letter and legal size documents. The automatic document feeder works well with documents up to about 50 pages long.

The instructions for installing the software drivers were a little confusing. I recommend going to Fujitsu's website and downloading and installing the latest drivers. The download contains a setup file that automates the driver installation process.

The scanner comes with USB and SCSI cables (use one or the other), Adobe Acrobat 5.0, and pretty much everything you need. Personally, I prefer PaperPort 9.0 software (not included) for scanning and organizing documents. So, I did not evaluate any of the other software (besides Acrobat) that comes with the scanner.

All in all, I highly recommend the 4120C for small office and workgroup users.

I first saw this scanner when I went to the hospital for a routine procedure and was impressed with its small size and speed. The employee who was scanning told me what a pleasure it was to use. I was hooked, and after doing some research, I bought it to use at home to replace my flatbed scanner. I scan receipts, warranties, bank statements, brochures, books, etc. I usually use it with my desktop pc, but it is so light and small that sometimes I take it into another room to use with my laptop.

This is not an inexpensive unit, but I decided the convenience and performance was worth the expense for home use. I have not been disappointed. The difference between using this and a flatbed scanner is night and day.

Setup was relatively simple, although the instruction manual did not mention that it was necessary to install a separate USB driver from the installation cd in addition to the twain and isis drivers that are necessary for the scanning software that comes with the unit. If you are a computer novice this might pose some difficulty, but I doubt a computer novice would spend this much money for a scanner to use at home or in the office.

The scanner comes with two separate scanning software programs. I prefer QuickScan, which lets you set up different profiles depending on what kind of documents and files you are working with(e.g. pdf for a brochure, tiff for a black and white receipt, jpeg for a color picture, etc.). This is a very handy feature since it permits scanning different kinds of documents with a minimun of time spent changing scanner settings.

The duplex feature is what really sold me on this scanner. I recently cut off the binding of a paper back book and scanned several hundred pages into a pdf file in less than ten minutes. It's also very handy to scan an invoice that has all kinds of fine print on the back.

Like any other device, you need to do some experimenting to customize it so it performs the way you want. If you do, you will not be disappointed with this product.

This is not a cheap scanner, you already knew that. But I think it is worth the price if you have lots of paper you want to turn into ones and zeros. I had a few cardboard boxes full of paperback books that were taking up too much space, but I didn't want to throw them out. I cut off their bindings with a band saw and ran the pages through the FI-4120C and turned them into PDF files -- about 200 books, somewhere around 30,000 pages -- only cleaning out the paper dust every few books. I won't say it never jammed, but it jammed seldom enough to be highly productive, and it always had a good reason when it did, like residue binding adhesive. All the scans were excellent quality. I leave it set up on the computer desk because it doesn't take up much desk space. When bills or bank statements come in I scan them and throw away the paper instead of letting it pile up. A good, reliable commercial-quality document scanner, and rebuild kits are available for the rubber parts that wear out.