Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 Review

Most people need a scanner that's reliable, fast, and affordable, with high-resolution, color-accurate results and easy access to scans. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 delivers all of that without breaking the bank.

Scan Quality

The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 takes advantage of its 600 dpi optical resolution, reproducing scanned receipts, text documents, and handwritten notes with incredible detail and accuracy.

On an initial test, we did observe a little bleed-through, where the optical sensor over-exposed a receipt and the reverse side was visible, but subsequent tests resulted in sharp, clear receipts with dark and crisp text that was easily readable against a background with little noise or grain. We believe the initial receipt test with bleed-through was more than likely caused by the path the receipt took over the rollers, and we didn't observe any flukes or irregularities in additional testing, just exceptional results.

Text quality from scanning text documents is sharp and precise. Text is solidly filled, and accurately mirrors the original document. Minor jaggedness at the edges of lettering was only visible under serious digital magnification.

The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 also handled handwriting with a high level of fidelity. Overall, ink from the ballpoint pen used in the original is nicely filled in the digitized version, borders and lines are shaded properly, and the character of the ink from a handwritten note is preserved.

We did observe a bit of noise and grain in white regions and the background in general, turning the white background into the faintest grey, instead of a perfect white, but the scans were still great, and it is hard to be critical when evaluating the results of very capable scanners like this one.

Speed

Unlike your commuter car, where it doesn't matter if your vehicle can go 180mph because you are never going much over 45 in stop-and-go traffic anyway, the speed of a scanner does matter. Higher operational speeds can turn a bottleneck into a painless task. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 crushes those tasks with speeds more similar to a commercial office solution, helping you address more important tasks and more efficiently chip away at the day's workload.

Fast scanning rates, duplex scanning, and a 20-sheet document tray are sufficient for making short work of most office scanning tasks. In a typical scenario, where we scan a 10-page, black-and-white, double-sided document, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 stood apart from most of the other scanners in our lineup. It handled the job at a rate of 26.1 pages per minute, which is 23 seconds for the job, and about twice as fast as the average across all the scanners we tested.

There isn't anything a whole lot better than a piece of office equipment or software that handles a task efficiently, allowing you to get back to more important things. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 is that piece of equipment you may be missing in your home or office.

For jobs larger than twenty pages, which is the maximum capacity of the document feed tray, you will have to be ready to feed the remaining pages of your large documents. However, given the speed at which it operates, you are looking at just over a minute of your workday spent paying attention to a scanning task, whereas lesser scanners could turn the task into a fifteen-minute ordeal.

If you frequently scan more than 20 pages at a time, you may want to consider the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300's bigger brother, the iX2500, because it has a 100-sheet feed tray. However, we tend to think the iX1300 balances speed with a compact size very nicely, and we would be hesitant to size up the footprint and feed tray for the occasional large job and a generally negligible increase in speed.

File Management

A scanned document is just a picture without good optical character recognition and file management software that turns a printed document into a working text document or editable PDF, that is easy to find on your computer. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 provides that utility through the creation of near-perfect text documents and some of the best scanning software we've tested.

Most scanned text and PDF documents use invisible text layers over an image to make the text searchable, as well as invisible characters, layout breaks, and spacing so the text formatting is preserved when copied and pasted.

Our test scans of printed text produced perfectly formatted text documents, with almost 100% character recognition, only missing a page number inside of a circle using an obscure typeface; which it likely misrecognized as an image.

Unfortunately, the optical character recognition failed to capture much of our handwriting, struggling to identify both numbers and letters and turn them into working text, but the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 did a very good job of digitizing receipt text, accurately detecting text, numbers, periods, dollar signs, and parentheses.

Our testing process doesn't just evaluate the apparent success of turning documents into usable text, it also measures the ability to preserve content formatting whilst copying and pasting generated text to a Google Doc. In this test, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 didn't offer the most impressive results, missing a significant number of words and formatting. In general, it is pretty apparent through testing the iX1300, iX2500, and many Epson models, for optical character recognition, Epson models outperform Ricohs. If character recognition is a highly critical factor in your choice of scanner, you'll want to look at some of those other top-performing Epson models in our test lineup.

The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 comes with ScanSnap Home, which is some of the best file management software we've tested. The interface most closely resembles a filing cabinet, with automatic file naming, the ability to send files to over nineteen application destinations, and the ability to add additional locations. It also has built-in presets for different types of scans, including documents, business cards, receipts, and photos.

What we found exceptionally useful was ScanSnap Home's native database, which saves files even when you transfer them to separate external folders and locations. This allows you to go back and search for specific text and find documents faster than scrolling through dates.

Photo Scanning

Most sheet-fed scanners do a fine job of scanning photos and digitizing and preserving a printed photo in perpetuity, and the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 is no exception, producing results that preserve a photo's integrity with good sharpness, contrast, and color resolution.

For dedicated photo preservation or family heirlooms like your great-grandfather's service papers, a flatbed scanner generally makes the most sense, since it often offers higher scanning resolution and is gentler on fragile originals. While the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 is great for non-archival quality photo preservation, we found the document-feeding rollers a bit rough on fragile documents.

In terms of color accuracy, it performs well, though it renders images with lighter tones than the originals. It also preserves fine details well, and the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 does a good job reproducing black-and-white balance. However, it is noticeable that it handles brightness much better on black-and-white photos than on color ones.

In general, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 produces balanced images, so nothing looks too bright or too dull. It produces high-resolution images, capturing the rhino's edges cleanly when zoomed in and making it possible to pick out small details in the skin.

Should You Buy the Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300?

The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 is a well-balanced solution for those who need high-quality scanning performance and fast speeds. It also has an easy-to-use file management system, a compact footprint, and is affordable. It is a great fit for your home or office workspace, and it's small enough to tuck out of the way when you don't need it, saving precious workspace. We don't think you'll find a better balance of performance across the board, especially at this price point. We could identify only a couple of niche scenarios or use cases where we might advise looking at other models, but this is the best fit for most folks and well worth serious consideration.

What Other Scanners Should You Consider?

The Ricoh ScanSnap iX1300 excels for home and small business use, but in a busier multi-user environment the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 is possibly a more fitting option, due in large part to its larger 100-sheet tray, versus the iX1300's 20-sheet feed tray, and a large display screen that allows for easier computer-free operation. It is a step toward a more business-oriented machine, but it also takes up more space and costs more. If you intend to use a scanner to preserve a fragile heirloom or family photo, you'll want to look at a very impressive photo scanner: the Canon CanoScan LiDE 300. It is a bit of a one-trick pony when compared to the iX1300's broad capabilities and speed, but it does that one trick of digitizing photos very well.