Fujitsu fi-4530C

Good scanner insufficiently supported – The fi-4530C is a fast, efficient and cost effective SCSI/USB departmental scanner released I think in 2003. It worked very well until WinXP was superseded and then there were no more driver updates from the company. There was a work-around for Win7 which resulted in marginally less satisfactory use. It does not work at all in Win8 32 or 64-bit.

As Win XP must have been superseded 5 or 6 years ago, the 4 or so years of currency it had does not seem sufficiently long for a company not to upgrade drivers.

Perhaps the reason was return. The fi-4530C had been released at quite a high cost (about $12,000 I think) but dropped quickly to a street price of a couple thousand. About the time XP was being superseded, Fujitsu released the still current fi-5530C or C2. This did essentially the same thing at the same speed as the fi-4530C but was released at about 3 times the street price of the fi-4530C. (Approx. $7,500 with a street price down to about $4,000. The differences were, changed side panel colour, the addition of VRS by software and up-to-date drivers as far as I can see.

If it is true that they were the only difference (including I imagine an updated logic board so that it knew what it was) then I think it is pretty poor treatment of its existing customers by Fujitsu. Perhaps of course the logic involved somehow made it impossible for drivers to be written which would translate but that doesn't seem very likely to me; much more likely a small user base compared with that available to the version re-branded as fi-5530C. Fast, effective with broad capability, reliable and relatively inexpensive. No updated drivers