Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1400 ($395) sheetfed document scanner is a pared-down sibling to the Editors’ Choice–winning ScanSnap iX1600 ($495). To save $100, you’ll give up wireless connectivity and an onboard control panel. The iX1400 has no Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or mobile device support; the USB 3.2 interface can only connect to a single desktop or laptop computer. But that’s fine for many applications, such as scanning IDs at your facility’s front desk or documents for your one-person business. If you need to configure and run scans from more than one station, from handheld devices, or from the scanner itself, you should investigate the iX1600. Otherwise, the iX1400 is a fine, user-friendly for small office and home office (SOHO) purposes.
Compact, Friendly, and Easy Behind the Scenes
At 6.0 by 11.5 by 6.3 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighing 7.5 pounds, the iX1400 matches not only its iX1600 sibling’s size and girth but also that of the iX1500, the iX1600’s predecessor. It consumes about the same amount of desk space as several competing entry-level and midrange scanners, including Brother’s Editors’ Choice–winning Brother ADS-2700W and Epson’s WorkForce DS-575W Wireless Duplex Document Scanner. Canon’s imageFormula DR-C230 Office Document Scanner weighs about 2 pounds less than the iX1600 but stands about 3.1 inches taller.
When the trays are opened, the iX1400—like most of these machines—approximately doubles in height and triples in length, so make sure you’ve got enough room for the scanner to be set up and used.
Like the iX1600, the iX1400 comes with a 50-sheet single-pass automatic document feeder (ADF), which is about average for scanners in this price range. All the machines mentioned here so far have 50-sheet feeders, except the DR-C230, which holds 60 pages.
The iX1400 is designed to be configured and operated via the bundled ScanSnap Home interface and document processing software. There’s no control panel at all, just a single Scan button that will scan a document to your computer in accordance with the workflow profile you’ve set up in ScanSnap Home. We’ll look more closely at that software in a moment.
As I mentioned earlier, this scanner supports only wired connections via USB 2.0 through USB 3.2. That’s also true of the Canon DR-C230, but most other entry-level scanners have some kind of network support. The ScanSnap iX1600, the Epson DS-575W, and the Brother ADS-2700W can network over Wi-Fi; the Brother device also supports Ethernet, Wi-Fi Direct, and scanning directly to a USB thumb drive.
Finally, like the iX1600, the iX1400 has a daily duty cycle (according to Fujitsu) of 6,000 scans. That’s a lot for a scanner in this class, and it’s hard to imagine anyone actually capturing that many pages in a workday. But if you have the time and patience to load the 50-page ADF 120 times per day—and a workload that requires doing so—then the iX1400 and its companion software can handle it.
ScanSnap: Easy to Learn and Powerful
The software bundle consists of ScanSnap Home and ScanSnap Manager. ScanSnap Home is a scanner interface used to scan, edit, view, manage, and search for documents. It links with other applications and assists in creating and managing the software’s learning function. ScanSnap Manager includes ScanSnap Organizer, ScanSnap Receipt, ScanSnap Sync, and CardMinder, as well as Kofax Power PDF Standard (for Windows and Mac) and ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap, an optical character recognition (OCR) program.
ScanSnap Receipt helps you scan and organize receipts and other financial documents, and it supports choosing different currency types other than U.S. dollars—during installation or as needed. CardMinder helps you scan, glean, and archive business card data.
Like most scanning software, ScanSnap Home lets you define profiles that can be used repeatedly if you often want to scan to a particular file type or save your file to a specific location. One of these profiles can be associated with the scanner’s single button for more efficient operation.
Fast and Sure-Footed
Like the iX1600, the iX1400 is rated by Fujitsu at 40 one-sided pages per minute (ppm) and 80 images per minute (or ipm, where each page side is an image). That’s a bit faster than the other models mentioned here. All are rated at 35ppm/70ipm, except the Canon DR-C230 (30ppm/60ipm).
I tested the iX1400 over a USB connection from our standard Intel Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Professional. I also tested it using ScanSnap Home from the control button and got basically the same performance. To ensure consistency, we try to test all machines the same way, so the scores reported here are for PC-initiated scans.
As the ScanSnap iX1400 scanned our 25-page one-sided text document, I clocked it at 40.2ppm. It scanned our 25-page two-sided (50 sides) text document at 83.3ipm. The simplex score is pretty average for an entry-level scanner, but the duplex score is impressive, putting the iX1400 and iX1600 well ahead of the pack.
The most comprehensive test measures how quickly the scanner captures text and converts it to searchable, editable PDF. Here, the iX1400 scanned, processed, and saved our two-sided 25-page text document in 40 seconds. That’s the same score as the iX1600 achieved, and faster than all the other scanners mentioned above.
Fast scans only matter if the final results are usable and don’t require a lot of clean-up. Fortunately, OCR software is consistently excellent these days. The iX1400 scanned and rendered both of our Arial and Times New Roman font test pages error-free down to 6 points. These scores are very good, though they’re not the best we’ve seen. The iX1600, for example, scored 4 points error-free on the Arial text and 6 points without mistakes on the Times New Roman test, and the ADS-2700W scored 5 points error-free on the Arial page and 4 points without mistakes on the Times New Roman page. But it’s highly unlikely you’ll be dealing with text that size very often.
I scanned a couple of stacks of business cards into ScanSnap and then let it populate Microsoft Outlook with the data. As with most scanners I’ve tested, overall accuracy depends primarily on the design of the individual cards. Color backgrounds, gradients, and other features in and around the important text fields usually cause mayhem with the OCR process. Sometimes, depending on the complexity of the card, applying the various background and noise filters helped. Often, though, it pays to divide your cards into a scannable stack and a thoroughly decorated stack, and manually type in the data from the latter.
Even Without Wi-Fi, a Bargain
Choosing between the iX1400 and the iX1600 entails weighing whether you will benefit from the iX1600’s wireless networking and embedded ScanSnap control panel. Without those features, multiple users with different needs will have a hard time making use of the scanner. But if you’re dedicating a single workstation to scanning and archiving data in a single way, the single Scan button is ideal. The ScanSnap iX1400 is just as capable as the iX1600 of scanning quickly and legibly, so if you don’t need the iX1600’s extra features, the iX1400 is a sensible and thrifty choice.
