Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 Review

The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 offers some of the fastest speeds and highest quality scans of all the scanners we tested. Its ease of use, size, incredible speed, and scanning performance easily earns our Editors' Choice Award.

It outperformed the competition and scored at the top of the field in nearly every test we put it through.

Performance Comparison

Scanning Performance

The iX1600's scanning performance is impressive and earned one of the highest scores in scan quality tests.

The text documents scanned with the iX1600 look as good as the originals. Scanning both ink signatures and receipts gave us crisp, clear digital copies with no smudges. If, for any reason, the iX1600 were to have any issue producing crisp definition, you can adjust the scan settings to change text document scanning contrast. However, the stock scanning settings worked perfectly in our tests and required no adjustment, but we appreciate that the option is there.

The iX1600 scanned and duplicated color documents accurately, producing true-to-color, high-definition renders. All color graphics and solid regions of color resulted in crisp renderings, with no smudging, fading, gradation, or unevenness.

The iX1600 builds on the tech of its predecessor and takes it to the next level, digitizing photos exceptionally well, faithfully representing the original colors, and even increasing the vibrancy of colors.

Digitized photos looked almost exactly like the originals, except that the colors in the digital versions were actually a little bit brighter than the colors in the original photographs. The quality of digitized photos produced by the iX1600 is more similar to what you could expect from a high-end flatbed scanner and not a compact scanner.

Speed

The iX1600 was a clear winner in our speed testing, processing an impressive 67 pages per minute. The next closest model was only able to tackle a third of that in the same amount of time.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 features a collapsible paper output tray and a 50-page automatic document feeder so that you can keep scanning documents at an incredible rate of 67 pages per minute. That's about 50% faster than the previous model and 250% faster than the competition. Yes, it's fast.

Our only technical criticism about the speed of this model is the document feeder. At 67 pages per minute, increasing the document feeder capacity to accommodate more than 50 pages would be practical. Additional feeder capacity would allow the user to scan longer documents with less frequent reloadings of the feed tray.

Software

The intuitive and well-designed interface and a practical software package make the iX1600 easy to set up and simple to use. However, we did run into one minor issue trying to enable a specific feature.

We found the iX1600's software to be intuitive and user-friendly. It was also easy to install on both Mac and PC operating systems. Our setup took 10 minutes, but only because of a necessary firmware update. Aside from the firmware update, getting a Mac or PC to communicate with the scanner was a simple and completely painless process.

The iX1600 can automatically sort documents based on file types and automatically name documents based on their content. Those features didn't always work perfectly but worked well enough to simplify scanning. One feature that our testers had some issues enabling was the preservation of blank pages when duplex scanning. Sometimes it is desirable to preserve empty page breaks in a PDF. Enabling the feature wasn't intuitive, but it worked without issues once started.

While no scanner we've ever tested has been able to perform optical character recognition perfectly, some scanners have been close. The iX1600 is not one of them. It is not as accurate as other scanners we tested and missed a significant amount of words. Optical character recognition is the only test metric where this model didn't excel. Unlike every other test metric where it outperformed the other scanners we tested, it was just average in this regard.

The OCR was a pain point for the previous model that the iX1600 replaced, and while we had hoped the software would improve between the old model and the new one, it doesn't seem to be the case. We still hope Fujistu will eventually strengthen its optical character recognition in future software updates.

Ease of Use

The large and intuitive touchscreen interface of the iX1600 made it the most straightforward scanner to use of all the tested models, earning it one of the highest scores for this test metric.

The iX1600's touchscreen is an impressive 4.3-inch liquid crystal display and is easily one of the most intuitive interfaces we've used. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to sort through its many features, allows users to create custom shortcuts to their favorite features, and even allows users to color-code shortcuts.

The automatic document feeder folds away when not in use, reducing the iX1600's overall footprint into an incredibly compact size, making it easy to stow out of the way when not in use.

Should You Buy the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600?

The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 is a premium scanner that offers incredible speed and performance. It scored above and beyond in almost every metric, and we prefer this scanner to practically any other. If you work in an office or your business requires the digitization of many paper documents, then it's easy to justify the premium price. We recommend this scanner to anyone who values speed, efficiency, and quality results above all else.

What Other Scanners Should You Consider?

The Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 is a great option for a busy office or workplace that requires the regular scanning of large documents. However, it is an expensive option for those who do not need to scan large documents regularly. If you only scan documents occasionally and want something small that will fit into a drawer when you are finished, the Brother DS-640 has comparable results to other top-scorers.