The Fujitsu fi-7260 ($1,995) is a speedy document scanner that combines a sheetfed scanner and an 80-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) with a letter-size flatbed. In effect, it's the Fujitsu fi-7160($981.89 at Staples) with a flatbed attached, giving it the added ability to scan book pages, delicate documents, or material with (physical) depth. If your office scans a fair amount of books, or thick or delicate papers , as well as regular documents, then the fi-7260($1,259.99 at Amazon) is worth considering.

Design and Features
At 9.2 by 11.8 by 22.7 inches (HWD), the fi-7260 will need part of a table for itself. It weighs 19.4 pounds. The flatbed, with an image area of 8.5 by 11.7 inches, extends in front of the sheetfed portion of the scanner. Pages scanned from the 80-sheet ADF exit on top of the flatbed, which has a fold-out plastic stop to catch them. The ADF can handle both letter- and legal-size documents, and even can scan documents up to 18.3 feet long. It can scan hard and embossed credit and ID cards up to 1.4mm thick. Pages fed into the ADF don't have to be perfect; it can scan sticky notes, taped receipts, and labels. Ultrasonic feed detection helps secure against multifeeds. A five-line monochrome LCD on the sheetfed part of the scanner, coupled with up and down arrows, lets you control many functions from the scanner itself, and a scan button lets you launch scans from the panel as well.

As is the case with most workgroup document scanners, the fi-7260 only works with Windows PCs. It's one of a small but growing number of scanners that we've reviewed that supports USB 3.0, although our testbeds are still limited to USB 2.0.

Software
The software for the fi-7260 is the same that comes with the Fujitsu fi-7160. It's a sparse package, as most companies looking for a higher-end document scanner already have a document management solution in place. PaperStream Capture is a scan utility, which can scan to BMP, PDF, TIFF, and JPG formats. PaperStream IP Twain and ISIS drivers let you scan to most applications that have a scan command. The ScanSnap Manager for fi Series utility lets you scan to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Email, Print, Folder, Picture Folder, and editing for PDF. Abbyy FineReader for ScanSnap 5.0 works with ScanSnap Manager and offers text recognition to convert scans to text documents.

I used PaperStream Capture for our speed testing. It offers three default color profiles—Black and White, Color, and Auto Color—from which you can clone, edit, and rename custom profiles. For example, Black and White was (peculiarly, to our thinking) set to save documents in TIFF format, and I changed it to scan to PDF for our testing.

Speed
Fujitsu rates the fi-7260 at 60 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) and duplex (two-sided) scanning at either 200 pixels per inch (ppi) or 300 ppi across all color modes. Ratings supplied by companies are based on raw scan speed, the time actually spent scanning the pages, and the fi-7260 just exceeded its rated speed, turning in 62.5ppm for simplex and 125ppm for duplex.

Our official timings, however, are from when we press the scan button to when the document is saved to file. With the fi-7260, it's a two-step process, because after the pages are scanned, a popup message asks if you want to add more pages. In my testing, I stopped the timer when that popup appeared, and restarted it when I clicked "No."

Using black-and-white mode to save to image PDF, the fi-7260 tested at 47.5ppm for simplex scanning and 40.5ppm or 81 images per minute (ipm), where each side of a page counts as one image, in duplex to image PDF format. The simplex time was a little faster than the essentially identical Fujitsu fi-7160, which I timed at 40.5ppm, while the fi-7260 matched that scanner's duplex time of 40.5ppm and 81ipm.

The Epson WorkForce DS-860 Color Document Scanner ($899.00 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice document scanner for moderate to heavy-duty use in a midsize office, was a bit faster than the fi-7260, scanning the same test document at 54ppm/91ipm. We timed the Kodak i2900 ($3,659.91 at Amazon) , with the same rated speed as the fi-7260, at 42.9ppm for simplex scanning and 41.7ppm or 83.3ipm, for duplex scanning. Unlike the Epson DS-860, which is a purely sheetfed scanner, the Kodak i2900 integrates a flatbed with a sheetfed scanner.

When you set the fi-7260 to scan to searchable PDF, you get a popup message: "If you save to searchable PDF, it may take a very long time in text recognition." That's true of most scanners, which take considerably longer in scanning to searchable PDF—since it adds a text recognition stage—than to image PDF. In scanning the same 25-page, 50-image document to searchable PDF, the fi-7260 averaged 1 minute 22 seconds, 45 seconds longer than it took to scan to image PDF. That's a good time, 4 seconds faster than the Fujitsu fi-7160, and a little slower than the Kodak i2900 (1:09) and Epson DS-860 (1:12).

OCR
The fi-7260 includes a version of the Abbyy FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) program (FineReader for ScanSnap 5.0) that is integrated with the ScanSnap Manager utility. The combination of scanner and program did poorly in recognizing text when converting scans to Word documents. It had problems with both our main test fonts, Arial and Times New Roman, with errors in all sizes up to 12 points. In both cases, there was a tendency for certain words to be run together. It actually did better with some of our less common fonts, though others it mangled.

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Conclusion
The fi-7260 is less expensive than the Kodak i2900, another scanner that combines flatbed and sheetfed elements. In our testing, it fell a little short of the Kodak model's speed in scanning to both searchable and image PDF, and its OCR performance is worse. Its ADF capability falls well short of the Kodak scanners's 250-sheet behemoth. And while the fi-7260's flatbed's platen is surrounded by a plastic margin more than an inch wide on all sides, the Kodak i2900's platen goes right up to the edge of the scan bed, so you can position a book with the page that you're scanning on the platen, the spine at the edge of the platen, and the facing page hanging over the side.

The Fujitsu fi-7260 incorporates the same sheetfed scanner as the Fujitsu fi-7160, so if you can do without the flatbed, you can save a lot of money by getting the latter. As a sheetfed scanner, though, the Editors' Choice Epson DS-860 is faster and has better text-recognition abilities. But if you have books, or thick or delicate documents to scan, the Fujitsu fi-7260 can get the job done. And it integrates a fast and feature-rich sheetfed scanner to put you in good stead for standard document scanning.

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