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SCANNERS
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Fujitsu has gone back to basics with its new SP Series scanners
Back to the future
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
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,” Schulz said.
Because the SP Series has the same
PaperStream IP driver capabilities as the
fi-series, businesses can easily upgrade
to fi-series devices 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.
Resellers benefit
Schulz adds that the channel, too, can
benefit from Fujitsu’s back to basics
approach.
“A lot of resellers that have not been
involved with document scanners and
document management to a great extent
have a new entry point, an alternative
entry point that allows them
to appeal to customers in a
simpler and more basic way,”
he said. “They could focus on
understanding and educating
customers on the basic entry
points into digital archiving and
then grow over time.”
The SP Series, suggests
Schulz, could even be bundled
with archiving solutions to help
resellers and ISVs demonstrate the
benefits of a software solution.
“Because a scanner is a human
touch-point, it relieves resellers
from the requirement to explain
virtual routines that are not visible
to their customer,” he said.
It is built for
a specific
purpose and
should be
purchased
for a specific
purpose
Fujitsu :
SP Series Scanners
