Fujitsu Image Scanner fi-8270 Review – PCMag
For office document management, a sheetfed and a flatbed tie the knot
I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
The Fujitsu fi-8270 is a fast, accurate document scanner for midrange to high-volume loads. A combination of sheetfed and flatbed designs, it packs capable OCR and archiving features, too.
Fujitsu’s Image Scanner fi-8270 ($2,195) plays multiple roles in the company’s business scanner lineup—it’s an update to the fi-7260 that premiered in 2015 and an upgrade from the fi-8170 Color Duplex Document Scanner that won our Editors’ Choice honors in March of this year. It also plays dual roles in your office, as a middle- to high-volume sheetfed document scanner combined with a flatbed scanner. In other words, you get the best of both worlds, scanning multipage documents with a 100-sheet feeder, or putting photos or bound book or magazine pages on the flatbed as needed.
Like the sheetfed fi-8170, the fi-8270 is a fast and accurate scanner with a multitude of high-end features and a highly useful software bundle that manages scanning and document management. We liked most everything about this scanner, barring perhaps its steep price and costly software upgrades; some of its more-than-capable competitors are several hundred dollars cheaper. If price isn’t your company’s top concern, however, the Fujitsu fi-8270 will serve you and your busy enterprise office well.
The fi-8270 is the middle of three new high-volume combination sheetfed/flatbed scanners from Fujitsu. The fi-8250 offers most of the same features for less, but it’s a bit slower, and its daily duty cycle is a couple of thousand pages smaller. The fi-8290, on the other hand, is considerably faster than today’s model, with a duty cycle 3,000 pages higher.
Like the Raven Pro Max, another PCMag favorite that combines that company’s Raven Pro sheetfed document scanner with a flatbed attachment, the fi-8270 teams Fujitsu’s fi-8170 with a flatbed, as you can see in the image below. The combined devices measure 9.2 by 11.8 by 22.7 inches, and the unit weighs just over 19 pounds.
Those specs are similar to those of the Raven Pro Max. Another recent sheetfed/flatbed combo, the HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow N6600 fnw1, is much shorter and leaner, closer in size to lower-end models like Epson’s DS-1630 and PCMag’s Best of 2019 winner the Xerox Duplex Combo Scanner.
As it’s primarily an enterprise or a fleet scanner, you and your team will most likely access the fi-8270 via the company network, though many tasks such as setting up and executing basic scans or selecting workflow profiles can be performed from the device’s control panel. The latter consists of a few buttons and a navigation rocker for scrolling through options on a small display.
And of course, most scans from the flatbed—photos, book pages, fragile documents, or whatever—are usually handled from the control panel.
Multipage documents, whether single- or double-sided, are handled by a 100-page automatic document feeder (ADF), which is the standard for document scanners in this class. The Fujitsu’s recommended daily duty cycle is 10,000 scans, exceeded among the machines mentioned here only by the fi-8290 at 13,000. In any case, as I’ve noted before, reaching the daily limit with a 100-page ADF takes dedication—i.e., loading the feeder at least 100 times.
The Raven Pro Max’s daily max is 6,000 scans, and both the Epson and Xerox are rated at well under 5,000 scans daily. (They have 50- and 35-page ADFs, respectively.) The HP N6600’s duty cycle is 8,000 scans daily, though that company’s soon-to-be-reviewed ScanJet Pro 3600 offers a 60-page ADF and a 3,000-scan daily limit at a considerably lower price.
At least two of the fi-8270’s more direct competitors, the Raven Pro Max and the HP ScanJet N6600, come with Wi-Fi wireless and Wi-Fi Direct peer-to-peer networking, in addition to Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.2 connections. This Fujitsu supports only USB and Ethernet, offering little or no support for scanning from handheld smartphones or tablets. The Raven also has an auxiliary USB port for scanning to flash drives and other USB storage devices.
As I said about the fi-8170 a few months ago, Fujitsu reps tell me the company’s high-end business scanners are usually deployed within existing document-management environments and workflows, whose users often already have a software solution in place. If you’re rolling out a new document-archiving system, however, the fi-8270’s bundled PaperStream programs and utilities (and available add-ons) should have everything you need.
The Fujitsu’s long list of apps and utilities includes PaperStream IP Driver (TWAIN x32/x64/ISIS), WIA Driver, Image Scanner Drivers for macOS and Linux, PaperStream Capture, PaperStream ClickScan, Software Operation Panel, Error Recovery Guide, ABBYY FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) for ScanSnap, and Scanner Central Admin. For enterprise-level document management, you can upgrade to PaperStream Capture Pro and PaperStream NX Manager.
Industry-standard TWAIN and ISIS drivers connect the scanner to the many third-party programs (including most Adobe and Microsoft Office apps) that support scanning into them directly. PaperStream Capture is an adroit front-end scanning utility. Fujitsu says PaperStream Capture Pro offers “an efficient yet easy way to convert paper documents into digital files for high-level data indexing and extraction” and charges $470 per seat for it.
Finally, PaperStream NX Manager is a built-in server solution designed to integrate centralized client-server document management systems easily.
Like its flatbed-free sibling the fi-8170, the Fujitsu fi-8270 is rated at a brisk 70 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 140 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm), where each page side is counted as an image. (This scanner’s humbler and grander siblings, the fi-8250 and fi-8290, are rated at 50ppm/100ipm and 90ppm/180ipm respectively.)
The Raven Pro Max is just a tick slower at 60ppm/120ipm. The HP N6600 is good for 50ppm/100ipm, and Epson’s DS-1630 and Xerox’s Duplex Combo trail at 25ppm/50ipm.
I tested the fi-8270 via a USB 3.2 connection to our testbed, an Intel Core i5 desktop running Windows 10 Pro and Fujitsu’s PaperStream ClickScan. First, I timed the fi-8270 and its software as it captured both our one-sided 25-sheet and two-sided 25-sheet (50 sides) text documents and converted them to and saved them as image PDF files.
As in all our tests, the Fujitsu performed very closely to its sheetfed sibling the fi-8170. At 72.2ppm and 143.7ipm, the fi-8270 is one of the fastest scanners we’ve seen recently, and certainly the fastest sheetfed/flatbed combo. It beat the Raven Pro Max by about 10ppm and 20ipm and the HP ScanJet N6600 by about 20ppm and 40ipm. The Epson DS-1630 and Xerox Combo finished way back.
Next, I clocked the fi-8270 as it scanned, converted, and saved our two-sided 25-page text document to the more useful searchable PDF format. Like the fi-8170, it captured and saved all 50 sides in an impressive 25 seconds. That beat the HP by 3 seconds and tied the Raven.
To round out my tests, I scanned several colorful business documents, drawings, and other graphics and photos on the flatbed, focusing not on speed but color accuracy and detail. Other than the unavoidable tedium of removing and replacing content on the scanner glass, the flatbed performed fine, reproducing colors accurately with no graininess or loss of detail.
As I’ve said more than once, OCR accuracy is at least as important as raw speed; the fastest scanner on the planet is worthless if you must spend too much time fixing conversion errors. The Fujitsu fi-8270 proved error-free down to 5 points in our Arial font test and 6 points with Times New Roman. That’s superb—and these days, fairly average for professional-grade scanners.
Like most Fujitsu scanners, the fi-8270 comes with everything you need to scan and archive most document types, ranging from business cards with contact information management to financial data such as receipts and invoices. It offers convenient workflow profiles with multiple scanning destinations and a wealth of high-end correction and enhancement features.
The only things that put us off about this scanner are its over-$2,000 list price (though we did find it for $500 to $600 less at some outlets) and the extra cost of Fujitsu’s most advanced document-management software. Even so, the fi-8270 is an excellent product that should, like most Fujitsu document scanners, hold up for years. If your budget allows it, the fi-8270 will not only get the job done, but it will do so elegantly and reliably.
The Fujitsu fi-8270 is a fast, accurate document scanner for midrange to high-volume loads. A combination of sheetfed and flatbed designs, it packs capable OCR and archiving features, too.
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I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).
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