Canon imageFORMULA RS40 – Photo and Document

Scanning my way through thousands of photos
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:UsersAppDataLocalTemp 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!

Does NOT work with MAC OS!! They lie in the SPECS!
The Canon RS 40 Photo scanner looks like a nice product and worked fine at first, but then as MAC OS had updates, the Canon drivers did NOT keep up and the product STOPPED WORKING on Mac OS after only 2 months. Windows folks, you’re probably OK…MAC OS users…BEWARE!

Excellent multipurpose scanner.
The bottom line: I’m very pleased with my purchase, I’m wishing I had bought this long ago; it is an excellent multipurpose scanner. As a document scanner, easy 5 stars. As a photo scanner, the “Photoshop” capabilities are inferior to the Epson. If there were no Epson, I’d give this 5 stars instead of 4.There are two parts to a scanner: the machine and the software.I enjoy using good tools and the machine is fast, handles a large variety of sizes (important for photos), any length of document (important for legal papers), and its very easy to clean. It also scans both sides at the same time, not need to turn something over and scan again. I’ve run old Polaroids, stacks of twenty photos through it, long real estate documents, drivers license (thick and stiff), many sizes of photos. Occasionally I get a jam or double feed but the machine stops so quickly that nothing has been ruined. Very nice machine and an amazing time saver compared to a flat bed scanner.I’ll describe the software in two parts as well. The interface and the image correction.The interface has a small learning curve. First you have to make a click-on decision: document, or 1-sided or 2-sided photo. Next you click-on decide where you want the scanned image to go, the Output. It comes with multiple options. The factory options can be deleted and you can also create new “Output”. The weakness of the software is that it doesn’t use pop-up windows to give an image a name a select the scan to location. You have manually open your “Output” choice if you want to change the image name and/or location. After you review/change those options, you must close the “Output” and click on “Scan”. I’d prefer that when you click on the “Scan” button a popup you show you the name and destination. If you’re not changing any settings, there’s a “SCAN” button on the machine; load you item press scan, and the image goes to the last location with the same name last used with a number appended (001, 002, etc.). This also means if you want to name your photos individually, you must go through the edit process for each photo; but I suspect that is common to all makes of scanners.The software has imperfect correction capabilities. Based on real user reviews, EPSON sets the gold standard. I’ll suggest that Epson won’t be able to surpass the RS40 on document scanning; only better for photos. The two sided scanning isn’t as good as Epson either. It scans both sides of photos even if there’s only a “Kodak” imprint on the back of the photo. So if your goal is to get the “cost is no object” photo scanner, I suggest you double the cost of the Cannon RS40 and buy the Epson FastFoto FF-680.

Muy buen equipo para escanear rápidamente documentos y fotografías. Hasta ahora he escaneado mas 150 fotografías de todos tamaños con diferentes ajustes de brillo, contraste, resolución, etc. y todo perfecto. Se han quejado de que raya o deja marcas en las fotos, pero no es así, la clave es limpiar de polvo las imágenes o documentos antes de escanearlos y también asegurarse de no introducir fotos o documentos rotos ni con dobleces. Altamente recomendable y mucho ahorro de dinero comparado contra el scanner de Epson

Unable to use with a Mac even though it was advertised it could be.