Canon imageFormula DR-3010C

It's not often that the same product is both highly impressive and disappointing, but the Canon imageFormula DR-3010C ($800 street) manages exactly that trick. It's impressive, because it does well on every task a document scanner should do: namely, document management, optical character recognition (OCR), and business card management. It's disappointing, because it doesn't completely live up to expectations. In short, it's well worth considering but doesn't offer quite as much as it promises.

Scanners in general, and most Canon scanners in particular, typically perform at or very close to their speed ratings. The Editor's Choice Canon DR-2580C ($875 street, 4.5 stars), for example?which I reviewed in 2005 but is still available?came in very close to its rating in our tests, at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scans and 50 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scans.

Given that history, you'd expect the DR-3010C to turn in a speed close to its 40 ppm and 80 ipm ratings. In reality, though, if you use the default settings in the Canon scan utility that's designed for ease of use, it's a lot slower. (The scanner comes with a second utility as well, with different default settings.) The good news is that even with the default settings, it's still more than fast enough to be highly useable. The better news is that speed isn't the only thing that counts, and the scanner has a lot more going for it besides speed.

The Basics
The DR-3010C is a touch larger than a typical personal desktop scanner, at 7.8 by 12.2 by 11.5 inches (HWD) with the trays closed, but it's certainly small enough to keep near your desk, if not on it. Aside from having to snap a roller into the scanner, setup on a Windows Vista system was standard. The collection of bundled software, on the other hand, is notable for offering far more than you get with most scanners.

In addition to two highly capable scan utilities, Canon includes Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management, NewSoft Presto! BizCard 5 SE for business cards, Nuance OmniPage SE4 for optical character recognition, Ecopy PDF Pro Office to edit and manage PDF format files, and Kofax Virtual ReScan (VRS) for digital enhancement of hard-to-read scans. Most scanners, for example, will turn highlighted text into a solid block of black. VRS can ignore the highlight and read the text.

Note that except for the special-edition versions of OmniPage and BizCard, these are full-fledged programs, and among the best of breed in each case. It's largely this collection of software that makes the DR-3010C do its various jobs well.

Speed
The reason the DR-3010C was slower on my tests than promised is because of the default setting for the Canon utility I used. The default is to automatically detect whether each page should be scanned in black and white or color, while the ratings are based on the scanner being set to one mode or the other, with no auto color detection.

More precisely, the rating at 200 pixels per inch (ppi) is 40 ppm and 80 ipm in black and white mode or 30 ppm and 60 ipm in color. Our tests are based on using the default settings, however, so I scanned our 25-sheet (50-image) test file at 200 ppi and automatic detection for color. Using those default settings, I clocked the scanner at 22.1 ppm for both simplex and duplex and 44.1 ipm for duplex.

Because our official result was so much slower than the rating, I also scanned the same document with the utility set to 200 ppi and black and white mode. With those settings, the scanner came in a little faster than claimed, at 41.7 ppm. So it's not that the rating is exaggerated, but that the auto color detection slows the scanner down tremendously. Basically, you have a choice between fast speed on the one hand, and the convenience of auto color detection on the other.

As I've already mentioned, the DR-2580C was faster using its default settings, at 25.4 ppm for simplex, and 24.5 ppm and 49.1 ipm for duplex. As another point of reference, the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-2020U ($645 direct, 4 stars), which Canon rates at 20 ppm and 40 ipm, was slower than the DR-3010C, but like the DR-2580C, it was close to its rated speed.

Adding OCR
The DR-3010C was also a little disappointing in the amount of extra time it took when I added an OCR step, telling it to scan to a searchable PDF file. Most scanners slow down significantly when you add OCR. One of the most impressive features of most Canon scanners is that they barely slow down at all. The DR-2580C, for example, took 59 seconds to scan to an image PDF file, and only 61 seconds to scan to a searchable PDF file.

The DR-3010C slows down enough to notice, at 1 minute 8 seconds without OCR, and 1:28 with OCR. Even so, it slows down far less than most scanners, and its ability to scan directly to searchable PDF format without adding a great deal of time earns it high marks for document management applications.

Other Performance
In most of our other tests, the DR-3010C performed swimmingly. For OCR accuracy, it recognized text in both Times New Roman and Arial fonts at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. For business card management, it recognized text and parsed data into the right fields on about half of our stack of cards with either one mistake or none on each card, and made no more than two mistakes on the vast majority of cards.

I ran into one issue with business cards, with the user guide insisting that the cards should be fed in landscape orientation, but BizCard seeing only a center portion of each card when I tried scanning that way. The solution was to ignore the user guide and feed the cards in portrait orientation. A Canon representative insisted that landscape orientation is in fact preferred to avoid jams, and that the driver settings can be changed so that scanning in landscape will work with BizCard. As of this writing, however, he has not been able to tell me how to do that.

Ultimately, the DR-3010C offers impressive performance on tasks, and your choice of either reasonably fast speed with auto color detection or impressive speed without color detection. The collection of highly capable programs it comes with makes it a particularly good value, but even if you have all the scanning software you need, the scanner itself is well worth the price.

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