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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 May 2011I'm no image expert, but I was after a device for the mac to electronically scan paperwork rather than have it fill up the filing cabinet.
I had a canon scanner some years ago, then moved on to a (dreadful) canon multi-function device, and now i'm back where i started. The key features for me were no need for external power, USB only and the vertical stand. The stand works reasonably well, but may need a good lump of blu tack or something for a bit of extra stability. The stand is easy to remove so for larger docs I tend to put it back to horizontal. However I have scanned single docs vertically quite easily.
I was slightly disappointed to note a discernible smudge on the glass on first opening, but this was carefully cleaned.
The biggest letdown really is the Mac software. I have a love hate relationship with 3rd party manufacturer driver software - that is, I love to hate it. This one is no different. Trying to change things like default directories was torture, you'd change it only to come back later and find it was back to where you started. There are multiple locations for things like default save directory, depending on the mode of the scanner. The behaviour of the buttons is a bit frustrating, that is, depending on setup, you press one and the software auto loads, scans and exits without being able to change settings. I found even when auto scanning was off, it would still behave oddly trying to kick into the scan. It tends to get a bit confused when you start clicking oddly labelled options like "system driver" and image capture fights with the manufacturer software. I'm no mac zealot but the software could do with some mac-standards love. I *really* got frustrated with it and I'm a systems developer by trade!
I know that you can use image capture with the device but I suspect you still need various bits of the proprietary manufacturer software for the driver etc.
After a good hour or so faffing about, and a rare mac-reboot, things were somewhat better. I can now drop a doc into the scanner, press the front button and a PDF pops out in the directory I want it, or direct to Mail.app. So it does what I want.
We were also pleased that "scanner sharing" a feature of macos, (not the canon software) worked well, again after some faffing and rebooting. My wife went into Image Capture, grabbed the shared scanner from her mac, scanned a doc direct from her machine, which is very useful, but as I say this is not unique to canon.
So it is doing our correspondence very well which is what we bought it for. I have no doubt we will start scanning old photos in time so we can purge more clutter! It's difficult to fault at this price and I expect to get good use from it.
