Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Probably the best compact document scanner you can buy

The ScanSnap sub-brand has been around for a quarter of a century. Once owned by Fujitsu, and most recently part of Ricoh, it's always been focused on document scanners like the one we're testing here. The Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 is a compact A4 scanner, designed for desktop use, and capable of a claimed 45 pages per minute (ppm) performance.

While many scanners in this niche make do with a USB connection to a single PC, the iX2500 has both a wireless interface and a large color touchscreen. So equipped, it's suited not just to a single workstation, but as the archival and digitization hub for a small team. You can link this scanner to multiple devices, the users of which can create multiple shortcuts to scan and send jobs where they need them. With internet access, you can even connect to cloud services for easy sharing across teams and users.

There's nothing unusual about the rest of the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500. Available in black or white, it follows the desktop scanner convention of a robust unit, roughly pentagonal in cross-section, and protected when not in use by its input tray. Unfold this, and the scanner automatically wakes up ready for its next job. You'll still need to withdraw the paper output, which tucks neatly into the unit's base when not needed.

As you'd hope, this scanner's trays feel almost bulletproof. The input in particular is very strong and almost flex-free, with paper guides that move smoothly from business card to Letter width. In contrast, the tip of the output tray does flex all the way down to desk level if you push it, but there's no suggestion it can't take the punishment.

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With most day-to-day functions handled by its touchscreen, the iX2500 has just two buttons. One is dedicated to starting a scan, while the other releases the top section, which tilts forward by about 45 degrees. That's comfortably enough to get at any jammed paper, or occasionally blow away dust. After 200,000 images or so, it'll also give you access to replace the roller kit, which costs around £40 (ex. VAT).

Like other desktop document scanners, the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 uses dual CIS sensors to capture both sides of each sheet in a single pass. In theory, this means it can capture up to 90 images per minute – quite a bit faster than we'd expect at this price.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Setting up

It should be fairly easy to find space for this small, light scanner on a regular desktop, or on any other bit of free space around the office. It's a compact device even with its trays fully extended – we measured a maximum depth of only 48cm. While you can connect it via USB-C, you'll need to join it to Wi-Fi to get the best out of it: if you're not planning to, consider the otherwise similar ScanSnap iX2400, or the Canon imageFORMULA DR-C350 instead.

Ricoh provides ScanSnap Home software for PCs and Macs, but there are also versions for Windows on Arm, Android, and iOS. Windows and Mac users can also download Tungsten (formerly Kofax) Power PDF editing software.

You'll need to install ScanSnap Home on at least one device to configure and save scanning shortcuts. These appear on the iX2500's touchscreen, from where you can activate them – for cloud destinations you needn't have a host device running when triggering the job. In a multi-user environment you can register the iX2500 to multiple devices: there's an option to enable Privacy mode, using which the shortcuts associated with a device only appear when that device is available.

We elected to join the iX2500 manually to a wireless router connected to our wired network. Ricoh's installer subsequently seemed to suggest we'd need to join our test PC to the wireless network in order to add this scanner, but after clicking Next it found and added it with no issues. After a firmware update – slickly handled as part of the installation – we were ready to go.

ScanSnap Home is – for the most part – a strong software package. You can use it to build straightforward scan workflows, choosing scan preferences and a job destination. These span the usual local suspects, such as a folder on the host device, but you can also save to a wide range of cloud services, including Google Drive and Photos, Microsoft OneDrive, or Dropbox.

At first it feels as though the software has been oversimplified. For example, you choose between normal, better, best, and excellent quality rather than the 150, 300, 600, and 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) that they represent – and we had to look online to even find that out. At the same time, it takes committed digging to find detailed page feed options covering de-skewing and double-feed detection. We couldn't find blank page skip settings at all.

As you'd expect, you get some control over the output quality through adjustable image compression. There's a choice of single or multi-page PDFs, with optional optical character recognition (OCR) for searchable results. Alternatively, you can save your scans as JPEGs, but not in PNG or TIFF formats.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Scanning

Any misgivings about ScanSnap Home were quickly dispelled once we actually started using it. It's responsive and fairly quick to process jobs, managing not to lag significantly behind the scanner itself on our modest test PC. Scanned jobs are displayed in a viewer, using which you can rotate or delete any rogue pages. Once accepted, there's a browser screen in which you can view recent jobs, filtering by document type, scan date, or any tag you've applied – for example, Invoice, Registration, or Remittance.

Whether or not you've enabled OCR for the full document contents, and depending on subject matter, ScanSnap Home attempts to grab enough text from the document to suggest a suitable name. The results here seemed inconsistent enough that we'd prefer to rely on manual or incremental naming to avoid confusion.

As you'd hope, this is a fast scanner. It could capture a single A4 page in less than seven seconds at 200 or 300dpi, but it dispatched a stack of 10 pages in just 18 seconds. It needed only 22 seconds to deal with a duplex scan of 12 pages, a rate of 65 images per minute. Selecting simplex or duplex scans made no difference to the engine speed – pages still passed through at the same rate. More unusually, selecting higher resolutions didn't slow things down by too much: at its 600dpi maximum this scanner captured a stack of 22 6x4" (15x10cm) photos in an incredible 15 seconds – the fastest we've ever timed.

Here, it's worth a direct comparison to Canon's ImageFORMULA DR-C350. This has a slightly faster claimed speed of 50 simplex pages per minute, and sure enough its physical scan times were slightly quicker in all but our photo tests. However, while the Canon required a few seconds' post-scan processing time, the ScanSnap didn't, often meaning that it fully completed jobs a couple of seconds earlier. Either way, the difference wasn't especially significant.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Results

While we needed to tweak some of the Canon ImageFORMULA DR-C350's settings, the ScanSnap iX2500 was bang-on using all its defaults. Scans were sharp and well-exposed, with office documents offering crisp text and graphics against a clean white page. Photos – despite the speed with which they'd been captured – were far better than we'd expect from a document-focused device. While not strong enough for professional imaging use, this scanner could work as a rapid way to digitize a large stack of conventional prints where exceptional quality wasn't the priority.

Just as significantly for a device that's likely to capture many thousands of pages over its lifetime, the ScanSnap iX2500 was absolutely faultless at detecting and correcting issues such as blank pages. While it's odd not to have a sensitivity setting, we found we simply didn't need it. One caveat is that, thanks in no small part to the excellent paper feeding, we didn't experience any crooked page feeding during our tests, so we couldn't test the de-skew feature.

The iX2500 was exceptional at dealing with page orientation. We present every document scanner with a torture test comprising a bunch of double and single-sided prints, along with thin and ageing double-sided magazine pages. Deliberately, some of the pages in this are upside down, but the iX2500 became one of very few scanners to consistently correct the orientation for the entire document. While most scanners are caught out by at least one graphics-heavy page, this one had no problems even when we repeated and jumbled the job many times.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 review: Is it worth it?

When testing the Canon ImageFORMULA DR-C350, we complained it was necessary to spend time looking for advanced settings to optimise its performance. At first, it seemed like the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 had the opposite problem: that advanced settings weren't even available. It turned out that they were mostly just well hidden, but also that we didn't need them. While we'd rather deal with proper resolutions in dots per inch rather than a nebulous scale where "Excellent" sits above "Best", it turns out that ScanSnap Home is good enough to get away with its simplicity – a trick that rarely comes off.

With straightforward and dependable software, together with a convenient touchscreen and Wi-Fi access, the iX2500 is easy for single users to manage, and incredibly so for a small team that all need a straightforward scanner. Throw in its decent speed, excellent image quality, and reasonable asking price, and it really is hard to find much to criticise.

Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500 specifications