Hardware

Review: Fujitsu fi-8170 Is a Simple Yet Powerful Scanner for Higher Education Applications

This versatile device combines ease of use on the front end with powerful administrative tools for managing an entire fleet.

John Breeden II

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer with more than 20 years of experience covering technology. Follow him on Twitter @TheLabGuys.

Document scanning is a critical activity for many colleges and universities. Employees may be tasked with capturing and digitizing many kinds of documents — transcripts, payment records, driver’s licenses and everything in between. Some scanners are even used in classrooms to record test results or submit papers. But the people working those scanners typically are not trained technicians, so introducing errors is too common an occurrence.

The Fujitsu fi-8170 is designed to help users scan multiple documents quickly and accurately, even when combining various paper sizes or substantially different document types, such as a driver’s license or student ID combined with an oversized transcript and a small check.

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Scanner Adjusts Pressure and Monitors for Errors

With the fi-8170, users don’t need to be especially careful when loading up the scanner. That’s because the rollers inside the device are motorized and roll independently, including the drive rollers and brake wheel. Even the tension wheel operates independently, applying adequate pressure depending on how much paper is loaded and the thickness of the stack. This allows the all-wheel-drive scanner to make minor paper-handling corrections as needed to produce perfect scans.

It’s also loaded up with optical sensors that constantly monitor for potential errors. An audio sensor can detect when someone loads papers with staples, and halts the scan to prevent the device from damaging the document.

Accuracy and Color Precision Are Priorities

A dedicated hardware chip that automatically corrects common errors, such as blurred or uneven lines, rounds out the document protection suite. The Fujitsu fi-8170 can even scan passports, which are often used as IDs by international students, without taking any precautions first.

Portable scanners typically aren’t known for their extreme color accuracy, but the fi-8170 — with 4,913 color settings, instead of the usual 30 — can capture very fine details from documents and even photographs.

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Fujitsu-fi 8170 Scans Up to 70 Pages Per Minute

The Fujitsu fi-8170 does all of this very quickly. In tests, it easily sustained more than 60 pages per minute with mixed document types, and nearly reached its maximum speed of 70 ppm during scans of more common and unified document types.

There is no need to be a scanning expert to use the Fujitsu fi-8170 like a pro. It’s a perfect tool for higher education settings, ready to accurately scan and digitize whatever students, professors or administrators can toss into its input tray.

Specifications

Maximum scan resolution: 1200 dpi
Maximum document scan size: 8.5x14 inches
Connectivity: USB or network cable
Dimensions: 11.8x6.7x6.4 inches
Weight: 8.8 pounds

Managing a Fleet of Scanners in Higher Education

Scanners are an important tool in higher education, capturing and digitizing everything from transcripts to passports and even student papers and tests. However, they are often deployed as stand-alone units, assigned to one department or even to a single staff member. As such, IT departments may struggle to manage them and may not even know how many a university owns or where they are deployed.

The Scanner Central Administration software that comes with every Fujitsu fi-8170 aims to change that. It offers powerful tools for configuring and managing scanners, as well as helping to maintain them so they last through many years of constant use.

Agents are deployed by the software onto the PCs that use each Fujitsu fi-8170 scanner. Once in place, they can report all aspects of scanner use and health back to a central location. Just a glance at the software’s dashboard gives administrators the complete picture of every scanner on their networks. If a scanner has a problem, such as a part that is starting to fail, administrators will receive an alert through the software dashboard or via email.

From the dashboard, administrators can also create and enforce user policies. For example, administrators might want to stipulate 600-dot-per-inch scans as a default option for most users to save storage space with smaller file sizes. They can do that, while also giving the option for certain users or applications — such as those that need to accurately capture financial information — to scan at 1200 dpi.

The admin software also makes it easy to set up a Fujitsu fi-8170 scanner in a shared environment. By using a network connection cable instead of the USB port, the scanner can be networked to a server instead of a PC by installing one of the software management agents there. The scanner can then be shared by any authorized user who is allowed to connect to that server. Each person or group can still be given their own individual scanner profiles, so no control is lost because of the shared environment.

And because the management server can be virtualized or put into the cloud, it truly makes the Fujitsu fi-8170 an enterprise device that can be fully managed by the IT staff from anywhere. That’s a lot of control and options packed into a free management software suite.