The Fi-5110C is a very good scanner for the money. I was after a low priced volume scanner so that I could get rid of a lot of the paper that I get with my job and at home. This one does the job nicely. I have broken my review down in to the sections below:
PAPER handling.
This is the scanners weak point. Although very good at drawing paper through it is not very good at separating sheets. I have found that the best thing to do is to slightly fan out the sheets that are going to be scanned and then put a small crease in the side that will be fed in to the scanner. When you put the sheets together to be scanned, the small crease will be in a different place for each sheet. The scanner will then pull them through.
It will easily scan thin and long till receipts to quite heavy A4 paper and keep it aligned for straight scans.
The long paper mode is also quite useful and is easily changed with the scanners twain driver.
SPEED.
Very good for the money. I scan colour documents in duplex at 150/200dpi and each page is scanned in a few seconds.
I have also set the scanner to aggressively compress the images before they are sent to the computer. This has a slight loss in quality, but you can relax this setting to get the detail back.
Higher DPI’s will make the scanning process longer and if you were to do this frequently for one or two sheets at a time, you would be better of with a flatbed scanner.
SCAN quality.
This is about average, but when you consider it is scanning in duplex and at speed it s not that bad. The quality can be improved, but the scan speed suffers and for me this defeats the point of have a volume scanner.
OTHER features.
It also has options to detect paper edges and paper thickness. The edge detection is very useful but it does not get the first page right. But if you’re scanning 20 or so pages, cropping just one page is not a big deal. The paper thickness detection is not worth using, this just seems to cause problems that I can’t get to the bottom of.
INTERFACE.
It uses a USB interface and I use the TWAIN drivers. The user interface has only crashed once which I think is perfectly acceptable.
I don’t use any of the scan buttons on the front of the scanner as I am using Scansofts Paperport Pro and I don’t use a lot of the other features. This scanner is a work horse a once set I have just used it (with the exception of the long paper mode).
SUMMARY.
Apart from the paper handling which can be very annoying, the speed, quality and over all configuration is very good.
Mark Godwin
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