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I've used the Fujitsu Fi-6130 (Ricoh) professionally for quite a while (bulk scanning in a medical laboratory) and privately (got mine on eBay for $100), and more than a decade later I'm still a fan. Drivers even still work for Windows 11, but unfortunately ... Ricoh/Fujitsu dropped the ball with macOS.
Enter: SANE ... an open source project for scanners, which supports tons of older scanners, even models that never had macOS support.
Not only does the project support my beloved Fujitsu Fi-6130, but it also runs on macOS Intel and Apple Silicon.
At the time of this writing it runs very well on my Macbook Pro (M1, Sonoma).
I did find it not very obvious on how to install this, so I'm sharing the steps I did to get things going.
(I did start with my scanner hooked up to my Mac - not sure if it makes a difference)
1. Install the SANE Backend (aka "driver") on your Mac.
I've found some old binaries for manual install, but ended up using this HomeBrew formula:
brew install sane-backends
Note: If you do not have HomeBrew installed on your Mac, then execute this in Terminal (official documentation)
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh )"
2. Install a SANE compatible front-end (aka "scanner application").
For this I used NAPS2, which a free and reasonable good and simple to use Scanner application that supports SANE.
Download it, install it, and run it.
Once the window opens, press the "Scan" arrow/button:
Since no scanner has been defined yet, NAPS2 will ask for some details.
Enter a name (I just typed "Fujitsu Fi6130"), check "SANE Driver", click the "Choose Device" button, and select your Fujitsu scanner.
These settings will be saved and you can multiple profiles, for the same scanner or even for different scanners.
Now that I found this, I wonder how well my Canon P-215 works with SANE!! (Canon is listed in their supported devices).
Anyhoo -- click OK and you're good to go.
Notes:
- SANE is available for other platforms as well (primarily Linux of course).
- VueScan is a good commercial alternative - truly great for photo scanning (highly recommended), but personally I do not like it too much for document scanning.
- The buttons on the scanner are not functional with this approach - beats not working at all though.
For those interested:
ExactScan (no OCR) and ExactScan Pro (with OCR, recommended for searchable PDFs) both are commercial products that work with the Fujitsu Fi-6130 out of the box as well. Both come with a free Twain driver as well (there is one for SANE as well: Github, binary).
Free trial can be found here: https://exactscan.com/
Did test ExactScan (and the Pro version) and they do work well, and offer comparable results as NAPS2 (which comes with OCR as well) ... just not for free.
