Canon RS40 Photo And Document Scanner

 So far I’ve just played around with the features on the unit and I have to say I am more pleased than I thought I would be with this device. My main purpose was to digitize documents more over than photos. I have tried scanning documents, as well as some photographs. When you scan photographs, there’s options, you can do a real quick scan with just basic functions, or you can choose some more in-depth functions color correction sharpness, etc. it does slow the scan down just a tad but not much. Overall ask him to stack a 4 x 6 photos in less than a minute. I have a few thousand 4 x 6 index cards which contains historical information from a business. You can see a sample video in this review of it scanning these index cards and how quickly the machine operates. I have scanned a few samples into PDF format and it works great. I scanned 70 8 1/2 x 11 pages front and back in less than two minutes. The only documentation that comes with this machine is how to set it up. I had to go to the website and download the user manual. Also, this has a feature where you can set up your own predetermined settings and save them to a particular job number then when you get ready to scan, all you have to do is select the job number on the display and hit start. Example job one on my machine scans whatever is in the machine and saves them to JPEG format. Job number two scans 8 1/2 x 11 documents and save them to a pdf. Job number three scans 8 1/2 x 11 documents double-sided and save them to PDF. One very important feature is that if you have a double sided document it scans both sides in the first single pass without you having to turn the documents over and re-insert them like you do with a traditional scanner. This really comes down to what your desired needs are but I am very happy with this. This is the first canon product other than my photography camera that I have ever owned and I am very pleased with tjos purchase.

I have been using this scanner for several weeks now, and scanned a couple thousand photos so far. I’m really happy with the device overall; the scan quality is good, and the workflow is reasonably fast. It was easy to download and install the “CaptureOnTouch” software that interacts with the scanner. The software does a great job of cropping the pictures, and I can choose to scan on either side, or both, or set a “sensitivity” so that images are only saved when auto-detected. This is great; if every 10th photo has a note on the back, that scan is kept, but all the empty photo backs are discarded. The software is a little clunky to navigate, but powerful. It offers preset settings, with the option to customize scanning behavior in lots of ways, choose where photos are saved to, etc. I thought the default scans settings lost too much detail on under-exposed or dark photos, and I was able to tune the contrast and brightness to my liking.

My workflow speed depends on how dusty my photos are, and how much I care about quality; small, nearly invisible motes can get stuck on the imaging surface and cause streaks until blown/wiped away. These streaks are usually most obvious on dark regions of pictures, and are even more visible after I increased scan brightness slightly, to preserve more detail for dark photos. I probably wouldn’t care about streaks for documents, but for my old photos, I want very few streaks. Therefore I watch the scanning app progress as photos feed through the scanner, and halt when streaks start to appear. The software warns you to clean after every 300 scans, but I needed to clean dust after every 10 photos on average. It only takes seconds to clean (I use a smaller “rocket air” hand pump and the provided wipe cloth), but I usually can’t just walk away for long, while scanning a huge stack of pictures. I provided a picture showing how the left portion of a dark photo scanned with a couple streaks (the bigger one is 10 pixels across), that went away after I cleaned and re-scanned the photo.

I’ve scanned pictures of many sizes and thickness. Tiny 2x3cm photos work well with the included “contact sheet”. The feeder accepts pictures of many different sizes, but they tend to get more mis-aligned during the feeding if different widths are batched together. Postcards scan nicely when fed individually, but get jammed when stacked.

I have hit a Win 10 CaptureOnTouch v4.12.2221.506 software bug that is pretty bad, and wanted to share a work-around. As I scan photos, the CaptureOnTouch app “buffers” them in a preview area. I can see thumbnails of each scan in the app, and select any thumbnail to view a large version. Users press a “Finish” button to copy all these buffered/previewable scans to the actual picture files in the export folder. So…the bug is that those buffered scans are saved in temp files on my main PC drive, but the app never deleting those temp files, even after a group of scans are “Finished” (exported to files). Those temp files are huge – about 100Mb each – probably because I scan at 1200 DPI. After I had scanned about 800 photos, my temp directory (and the entire C: drive hosting it) filled to capacity. Unable to write more buffered scans, CaptureOnTouch crashed, would only restart if I restarted Windows, and would crash again immediately after another scan. I had to manually delete the app temp files to create new space on the drive, and then the CaptureOnTouch app worked fine, as before. I think the “supported” way to delete temp files is by launching the “Windows Settings” window, typing “Delete Temporary Files”, and navigating through that process. I poked around and found the folder C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp was the one full of CaptureOnTouch files, and I manually deleted all the files there. I need to manually delete temp files regularly (for my drive, about every 800 scans or less). If I forget, the app will eventually crash again, and I will lose whatever batch of scans I had not already exported as image files…those files are in the temp folder, but in some internal format that I couldn’t figure out how to convert to jpeg. Please fix this, Canon!