fScanX

The fScanX® package provides Mac OS X (10.3, 10.4 & 10.5) native software to use the Fujitsu fi-5120C, fi-4120C & fi-4120C2 scanners via USB. (Support for the fi-6140 & fi-5650C is coming in May 2008.) Using fScanX and one of these scanners, you can scan up to 25, 40, or even 60 pages per minute (monochrome 200 dpi). fScanX will scan single- or double-sided documents, black and white, color or grayscale, directly into multi-page TIFF or PDF files. At last Macintosh users and developers can integrate high-speed production document scanning into their workflows!

fScanX from Scott Ribe made it possible to take our business to the next Level. Not only is FscanX the only production volume scanner driver out there, it's one awesome product!

Aaron Smith & Ryan Thorpe
Owners of 24 Hour Record Retriever & Abstract Inc.

This rocks! Today I borrowed an fi-4120c scanner, bought the fScanX package, unpacked the scanner, plugged it in to my G5 running Panther, and 20 minutes later I had implemented a scan function inside 4D (using the excellent Scripting Tools to do the command line), and could display the scanned documents with QPIX in my 4D layout.

Simply awesome! The scanning speed is great for mono and grey scale, somewhat slower for 8-bit color (due to the USB connection), but fast enough to be really impressive ;)

Thanks Scott!

Nils Kollandsrud, Ixmal Intelesis

The package contains both a standalone command-line utility and a simple GUI application. The command-line utility is perfect for integrating scanning into a workflow via scripting. You just specify the options (color mode, area to scan, resolution, single- or double-sided, file name) and it scans and builds a multi-page TIFF file or PDF file. Monochrome files are compressed using CCITT Group 4; grayscale and color TIFF and PDF files are compressed using lossles (zlib) compression.

The GUI application is useful for quick and easy scanning. It also is an XCode Cocoa project which uses the command-line utility, and source is included as an example:

Screen shot of fScanX GUI application.

fScanX is available for immediate purchase from the Kagi online store, starting at $149 per scanner. Purchasers will receive free upgrades through all 1.x versions, which will include at least these additional features:

  • A TWAIN driver.
  • Support for the scanner's SCSI interface, to enable faster grayscale and color scanning.

Actual measured throughput (using the 4120) for monochrome scanning is:

  • 25 ppm at 200 dpi (23 ppm duplex)
  • 17 ppm at 300 dpi (16 ppm duplex)
  • 8 ppm at 400 dpi (8 ppm duplex)
  • 8 ppm at 600 dpi (5 ppm duplex)

The performance page has more information on throughput, CPU utilization, and memory requirements.

One last note: I've found a very good prices on these scanners at ScanTastik.