Ricoh fi-8040

An affordable scanner with a nippy turn of speed, top output quality and a big choice of operational modes

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PRICE £249 exc VAT from thescannershop.​com

Ricoh offers an impressive range of desktop scanners, and the affordable fi-8040 on review is one of its most versatile. Using Ricoh's embedded DirectScan feature, it can function as a completely standalone network scanner, it supports host-based operations using its USB or gigabit port, and it can be remotely managed and configured with the PaperStream NX Manager app.

Installation is old-school as your host PC will need an optical drive. Fortunately, after loading the DVD in our Windows 11 test client, it offered the opportunity to skip the local files and download all the latest versions.

For host-based scanning you have two choices, with Ricoh's PaperStream ClickScan for Windows providing simplified one-touch scanning services. We loaded it on a Windows 11 PC and used a network connection to access the scanner and set functions such as greyscale or colour, a resolution, paper size and an output format.