Scanners, you can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em. OK so that's not quite true as I lived quite happily for 15 years without one. That's not to say I hadn't contemplated buyng one before, it's just that they had always been too expensive. That is until I read an article in some computer magazine or other which revealed the price of scanners had plummeted from >£500 to <£100. Couple this with an urgent need to send a copy of a document to a friend and there was my motivation.
Surveying my computer desk confirmed what I knew, deep-down, already. I have too much kit. It takes up too much space and uses to much power. There is barely a free square-inch of desk space to put anything and not a hope of finding a spare power socket. So that really set my specification. I needed something with as small a footprint as possible that didn't need a mains power supply.
A trip to the local Currys revealed that I had basically two choices. Both of them Canon scanners, both ultra-thin (barely 1 inch thick!) and capable of being stood on one edge, and both of them taking their power from the USB port. The two models in question were the canoscan 676u and the canoscan 1240u. With a difference of only £20 between them I opted for the one with the higher model number, safe in the knowledge that it must have a better specification if it had a bigger number in it's name!
Speaking of the specification it boasts the following:
- 1200 x 2400 dpi resolution - 48bit internal colour depth - 3 one-touch buttons for easy operation - upright scan function - z-lid capable of dealing with thick books (yeah, right!) - usb interface (which also supplies the power)
On getting it home I took it out of the box and fitted it to the supplied 'upright mounting stand'. Oh dear. It may "support" upright scanning, but it didn't feel like the stand would support the scanner, or not for very long at any rate. So I set about clearing some space for it. Desk-space duly allocated, it was plugged into my USB hub and proceeded to make some worrying grinding noises. A quick flip of the 'travel-lock' button on the underneath solved that problem and served me right for not reading the manual. To my amazement, Windows detected a new device and prompted me for a driver disk, so I fed it one of the two CDs which came in the box. A quick spin of the CD later and the driver was installed. Surely it couldn't be that easy... I put a photo on the scanner bed and pressed one of the allegedly 'one-touch' buttons on the front of the scanner. Almost immediately (but not quite) a dialog box appeared telling me that the scanner wanted to do something and asking which application (from a list) I wanted the scanned image sending to. Wow, this was going better then expected. I chose Windows Imaging as the destination and it proceeded with the scan. 30 seconds later I had the scanned image on my screen. All very impressive. But what if I wanted a bit more control of my scanned image rather than accepting the default resolution, colour-depth etc? It looked like I was going to have to install the Canon "Scangear Toolbox" as well, which is not a major problem. The CD was still in the drive so I rooted around until I found what looked like the right setup program and away it went. A typical windows installation wizard, asking me where I wanted it installed and then going off and doing it. A minute later and I was ready to roll.
Opening up the Scangear Toolbox presents you with a window containing 8 buttons. The first seven effectively store macro functions, pre-defined scanner settings which include Image type (the scanner driver will try to correct the image based on the type of image it is expecting),resolution and paper size. Some of the buttons have unique parameters, for example the email button sks which email client it should send the scanned image to, the OCR button asks which OCR package it should use etc. The 8th button allows you to assign a macro to one of the one-touch buttons on the scanner (but I havn't got it to work properly yet). Initially it's not the most intuitive setup in the world. It looks to me like Canon have tried to make it as user-friendly as possible, but in doing so have hidden a lot of the features that people who are used to scanning software would expect to find. Having said that, once you have found things and set them to your own liking, it is very straightforward to use. Press the button, double-check the settings and hit the big "Scan" button at the bottom of the dialog box.
Pressing the scan button starts the scanner off (unsurprisingly) and it is pretty quiet in operation, especially when scanning at higher resolutions as the scan-head moves much more slowly, which is something to be aware of. It takes just over a minute to scan a sheet of A4 at 600dpi, higher resolutions take correspongingly longer. The size of the resulting file is largely dependant on the amount of information on the page being scanned. For my test I scanned a page from a mountain-biking magazine which had some map extracts on it. Obviously there was a fair amount of detail on this but I was not expecting the resulting file to be 99Mb !! Ah well, its a good job I have plenty of disk space. To be fair though, saving the file in JPEG format reduced it down to about 4Mb which is far more palatable.
Testing the scanner with photos has revealed that it is just as good at them as it is with maps. It is even smart enough to detect multiple photos on the scanner bed and crop them accordingly, regardless of how wonky they have been placed. Even better, it exports them to your imaging software as two separate documents. A pretty neat touch in my opinion and it certainly speeds up the scanning of a huge photographic backlog. My only gripe here is that in multi-photo mode you have no choice over the resolution, it's either 300dpi or nothing. As for the quality of the output, photos appear on screen with colours that are almost as vivid as the originals (and remember that my monitor may not be set up to show true colours anyway). The resolution is fantastic if you push it all the way up and the error correction in the drivers seems to work fine, removing speckles and moire patterns from magazine prints as well as you could expect..
Bundled with the scanner on a second CD is Adobe Photoshop Elements which provides some basic image manipulation. It's not the full monty, but it is free and allows you to do pretty much all of the common operations on your scans.
Surely though, there must be a down-side to all of this? Well there is, but it's so small as to be forgiveable. The so-called one-touch scan buttons on the front of the unit do only need to be pressed once, but after that it requires further work, which brings the total amount of work close that what would be required to perform the scan the old fashioned way. But that's it really, and as one-touch scanning wasn't the reason I bought it I can't say that I am too disappointed.
All-in-all then, it's a fantastic scanner for the money. It looks neat, takes up little space (if you dare use it with the upright stand) and best of all, doesn't require any power sockets. The quality of the output is the best I've seen and the maximum resolution is huge, probably way more than most people will ever need but it's nice to have room to grow. It's only let down by not quite meeting some of the bold statements of one-touch scanning, but this is probably more a case of the Canon marketing people promising too much than a technical failing of the product.
[Originally posted on DooYoo back in 2002 (by me) but recently updated when ported to Ciao]
More details
Ease of use
Easy
Design
Good
Range of extra features / functions
Satisfactory
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
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