Canon imageFORMULA P-208II Personal Document Scann
Price:
(as of – Details)
The Canon ImageFORMULA p‐208ii scan‐tini personal document scanner’s ultra‐compact size and robust features make it ideal for mobile use at home, the office, and virtually anywhere in between. It moves from location to location as easily as it moves paper‐based information to select windows and Mac devices, and beyond. Canon ImageFORMULA p‐208ii scans in color or black-and-white & also it can an handle a variety of document types including thick or thin, plastic or embossed documents. One of the very robust features are character emphasis that improves legibility of hard-to-capture documents, auto resolution setting & photograph optimization.
Stay organized: Easily convert your paper documents into digital formats (searchable PDF, JPG, and more) or scan directly to the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, QuickBooks Online, Evernote, SharePoint, and more)
Convenient and portable: Slim, lightweight and sleek, to fit easily into a briefcase or bag, for use at home or on the road
Handles many different document types: Receipts, photos, business cards, long documents, and more
Fast and efficient: Scans both sides of a document at the same time, in color, at up to 8 pages-per-minute
Broad compatibility: Supports Windows and Mac; TWAIN driver also included
Bundled software: Powerful, yet easy-to-use scanning software, as well as a business card organizer
Backed by a one-year warranty and US-based technical support
Malodorous –
Works well
I scanned several hundred paper documents and backed them up digitally with the 3-2-1 method in an effort to clean out clutter at home.The quality of the scans is pretty good, but the software is awful as I expected. This is pretty much always the case: you buy some hardware which works pretty well, but the software interface was an afterthought (looking at you, Corsair).There are some limitations with the on-board memory where if you have a big legal-sized document that you want to scan in high resolution it will not fit in memory: apparently, this device is unable to stream the document across USB at the same time it scans although it seems not to fill memory across multiple pages. I recommend using black and white scanning unless you need grayscale or color, and to avoid the highest DPI setting. Even for dense legal documents or receipts with tiny print I found that I didn’t need the higher DPI settings. The generated PDFs were perfectly legible.It also uses the ancient mini-USB (not even micro USB) instead of USB-C which has been standard for several years at this point. At least it is USB powered and does not need a separate power brick.Feeding paper is a bit frustrating. The feed tray is not very deep, and documents regularly fed in at a slight angle. It also supports multi-page documents, but will sometimes double-feed. I found myself manually feeding second and third pages in to avoid this.Also, you feed documents in both upside-down and from the back of the unit. The instructions are clear but it is not obvious if you do not read them.Linux note: I used Windows 11, not Linux, but apparently it is compatible because it supports TWAIN. Digging into it a bit, it seems that other people reported success on various forums. I eventually want to test this out, but have not done so yet.Overall I gave it five stars despite some minor nitpicks. I bought it knowing it is a compact, portable, and inexpensive scanner. This was a deliberate choice because I want something I can fit in a drawer along with other seldom-used PC equipment such as an external Blu-ray drive, or throw in a bag to take somewhere else. I expected that a scanner this size will not have a big comfy feed mechanism like units three times it size and price have, and may take some extra time to scan. Which is also fine given after my initial scanning frenzy, I might need it once every month or two.Also, it gets a bonus star for not being HP. I owned one of their printers, once. Once. Now I go out of my way to avoid that company, even for non-printer hardware such as scanners.