Out of the box, our recommendation was to scan without a sleeve. That changed once we modified the feeder. Ricoh's trading-card guidance says plastic sleeves can crease or receive roller marks as they pass through the stock feeder, and for months we followed that guidance: raw cards only, sleeved afterward. We've since pulled the stock feed roller and installed a free 3D-printed part, and penny-sleeved cards now run through in the same batches as raw ones. If your fi-8170 is still stock, follow Ricoh's guidance and skip the sleeve.
The modification that changed our answer
The stock fi-8170 has a white feed roller that can crease a sleeve or leave a mark on it as the card passes through. We took that roller out and installed a TPU arm, a flexible 3D-printed part held in place with an ordinary paper clip. MTech Cave lists the part for free, you only pay shipping, and there's an install video if you want to see the steps before opening the machine. With that arm in place, penny sleeves stop catching on the roller. We didn't change anything else: same 300 dpi, same 3mm crop margin, same PaperStream settings we use for raw cards.
What still doesn't go through
A toploader is rigid plastic on both sides of the card, well past 1.4mm combined, and it's not built to flex through a feeder, modification or not. Same problem with a semi-rigid holder or a magnetic case. Any of those come off before the card goes in the scanner, then back on after. Thicker sleeves like Dragon Shields are also a no for us: even with the arm installed, there's enough plastic that the scanner has nothing to detect, and the back of the card can come back blank. Penny sleeves are thin enough to read through. Those aren't.
What we actually feed it
We use small, supervised batches of penny-sleeved or raw cards that are appropriate for automatic feeding. Valuable, fragile or irreplaceable cards get individual image handling instead. The toploader and team bag stages of protection happen after scanning. Full safety and cost context is in the fi-8170 review.
Correction, Aug 20, 2026: an earlier version said penny-sleeved cards feed like raw cards on a stock machine. We changed that claim to reflect Ricoh's published sleeve warning.
Update, Aug 21, 2026: we've now installed the TPU arm modification described above, and penny sleeves feed the same as raw cards again on our machine. The Aug 20 correction still applies to a stock, unmodified fi-8170.
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