I got a Canon DR-C240 scanner to replace a Fujitsu ScanSnap that had launched a denial-of-service attack on my USB subsystem (previous post). This is the latest and greatest Canon model that is supposed to have a flexible paper feeding system. It costs about twice as much as the Fujitsu.
It took about 15 minutes to get the software installed and everything plugged in.
I decided to test the scanner with a batch of stuff sent home in an end-0f-year bag with a kindergartener.
The scanner won’t go any wider than 8.5 inches, so some 9″-wide construction paper could not be scanned. The scanner could have been a lot more useful if it were just slightly wider.
A stack of slightly odd-sized cut paper was not scanned in order. The default is to scan at low resolution and in black and white. I had to go into Canon’s CaptureOnTouch software to change the settings to “full auto” from the default of “Text.”
Although there was laser-printed large text on each page with the name of the month, the Canon software decided that the January page should be rotated upside down. The software lets you delete blank pages before saving a PDF but not rotate any. I had to reopen the file in Adobe Acrobat (full version; not included with scanner) in order to un-rotate the page.
After you laboriously change the defaults in the CaptureOnTouch application and then try to scan a second stack of paper pressing the start button on the scanner… you find that it has gone back to its old “text/B&W” mode. You need to manually edit the setting for that button.
A document that had been stapled was fed through more reliably than I would have expected from the Fujitsu.
Some legal-size documents were scannable but the autorotate function failed to orient them correctly, despite the fact that they had some pre-printed block letters on them that should have been easy to detect.
A stack of four documents that started out as 8.5×11″ pieces of paper but had various folded edges scanned reliably (might have been a problem on the Fujitsu), but the resulting file had three spurious blank pages.
Some previously stapled skinny documents scanned nicely.
Blank page detection is spectacularly bad. I also scanned some business documents that had been partially highlighted. Whenever there was bleedthrough of the highlighter the scanner decided that the reverse of the highlighted page was non-blank. It doesn’t seem as though the software is looking for bleed-through or comparing a candidate blank page to the reverse.
OCR seems to be enabled by default when saving documents as PDF.
Verdict: The paper transport mechanism is more reliable than the Fujitsu, but it is not perfect. Blank page detection is so unreliable as to be a serious time-waster. You need to have the full version of Adobe Acrobat to go with this scanner (plus a lot of patience) so that you can clean up after its not-very-smart autorotate software.
You don’t mention the host OS.
On a Mac, the built-in Preview tool that reads PDFs has the ability to rotate, re-order, and delete PDF pages in “Contact Sheet” view mode.
Francois: I am using a high-quality Windows 8.1 machine. I love it so much that soon I will have to be the first (only) person on my block with a Windows Phone.
CaptureOnTouch on the Mac lets you rotate? I wonder if I have missed something. What is the actual method of invoking the rotation feature? Clicking right on the page, the standard Windows way to do things, doesn’t have rotate as an option.
I’m surprised you haven’t returned it already. Even one of those things would be a deal-breaker for me, let alone all of them, whereas my iX500 doesn’t have any deal-breakers at all.
I suspect your S1500 just developed a fault (the USB problem), and you needed a new one. I used to have an S300 (the portable model), and upgraded to the iX500 and it is an amazing upgrade — I love everything about it. Apart from the USB problem, what were you unhappy with about the S1500 (which seems physically almost identical to the iX500)? In other words, why did you decide to switch to a brand not known for its amazing scanners?
On the Mac the Preview app (built into the Mac) lets you rotate pages and delete them. I use it for my ScanSnap generated PDFs.
Does the Canon software perform an OCR and embed it in the PDF like the ScanSnap software?
John: Why did I abandon Epson? The paper feeding was never that great. It worked wonderfully for fresh-from-the-laser-printer stacks but if paper had been abused a little, or even stapled, there was some prep time required. Also, I don’t fault a company for making a product that fails but if it fails in such a way that it destroys other stuff (such as my USB hubs) then a line has been crossed (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LazrAzBP_0I for Bruno’s question on when a line has been crossed).
Larry: Okay, I was confused. I don’t know what Windows has for PDF previewing. But I don’t want to post-process PDFs with any tool, built-in or otherwise. I want them to be right the first time, either through automation or because I have touched them up in CaptureOnTouch before they go to disk. To answer your question… yes, it does OCR by default (I can’t actually find any control to turn OCR on or off).
I wonder if you might be better off driving the scanner with 3rd party scanning software such as PaperPort. Generally speaking when a product comes with “free” software, you get what you pay for.
Or for that matter, if you own full Acrobat Pro already, you can scan directly from Acrobat. File… Create…PDF from Scanner… Custom scan (and then configure as you like).
Usually there are two ways to drive a windows scanner – either TWAIN or WIA. Try both ways and seen if one suits you better (TWAIN brings up the scanner’s native interface, WIA has its own).