Customer Reviews

Canon DR-2080C Color Document Scanner

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This unit is small and compact, yet has some very nice features. I especially like the duplexing feature allowing it to scan BOTH sides in the same pass, no flipping a stack of documents over. It works from within Adobe, and Microsoft Office Imaging.

It does have a drawback, however, the drivers are not Windows XP, and it can be a bit disconcerting installing them. I finished the installation with no adverse affects (that I noticed) to my 2 laptops, and a stand alone machine.

If you travel and need a high speed scanner, I highly recommend this unit.

The Canon DR-2080 Duplex Color Scanner offers exceptional scanning for its small price tag. The output quality and speed of the DR-080 are comparable to competitive units 3 to 4 the cost and, in MANY cases, far superior to more costly units.

Although considered a "work group" level scanner, the DR-2080 will provide "Department" level productivity, limited only by original document size and daily duty cycles. Additionally, the DR-2080 comes with Canon's user friendly Scan utilities allowing very easy set-up and the ability to easily scan to a wide variety of file formats such as PDF, TIFF and JPEG.

The DR-2080's ease of use, superior output quality and reliability, as well as Canon's versatile, bundled software, will provide an effortless, stress-free scanning experience.

This is a great scanner, and you can't beat the price. As others have already noted, it is better than some scanners costing thousands more. I love it's size, speed, and duplex scanning features. I do have some complaints though:

1. Installing the paper guides prevents the dust cover from being closed

2. The deskew and border removal functions don't always work as expected (they remove more than required, and you can't control how much to remove)

3. The bundled software is clunky and stupid (for example, you can't use the arrow or page up/page down keys to navigate through a scanned document). Ditto for the help files, although that seems to be true of most software from Japanese hardware makers; for heavens sakes, folks, hire some native English speakers! The software also has some bugs, e.g., it frequently has "file access errors" when trying to append pages to existing files. However, it is fairly easy to use, and is good enough for low volume scanning.

Some tips:

1. Don't adjust the paper guides too snugly against the paper; the automatic feeder requires some "wiggle room" to catch the paper.

2. Use the "Scan ahead" mode to speed up scanning.

3. If you're creating PDFs, get Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the free reader) to manipulate your PDFs.

4. Set up custom paper sizes to quickly scan odd-sized documents like credit card statements, etc.

In spite of my complaints about the software, I'd highly recommend this scanner (in any case, my complaints are moot if you use some other scanning software). In the week since I got this scanner, I've scanned more than two thousand pages, scanning for a few hours every day (most of the time was spent organizing and ordering the documents). My big, ugly filing cabinet is almost empty...hurray!

You can get a cheaper scanner from Visioneer, but the ADF on that sucks. The DR-2080C uses an almost straight-through paper path, so very thin, very thick, or creased paper doesn't jam as much as with scanners that use a U-shaped path.

This is actually a very good scanner. It scans pretty quickly at 200 dpi/black-and-white OCR - it took me about an hour to scan in and OCR 400+ pages of class readings. I'm not exactly sure about the timing, since I wandered away every so often for a while. The duplex features are great - especially the option to remove blank pages. You can also change the threshold on what the software considers a blank page - it asks you to specify percent coverage, although they use a different term.

Complaints about this product that caused me to give it less than 5 stars:

1. As the last reviewer said, putting in the paper adjusters prevent the flap from closing.

2. It states on the DR-2080C's brochure (downloadable from Canon's website) that it is "Able to scan batches of mixed documents of different sizes, shapes, and weight." I took this to mean that you can drop differently-sized papers into the scanner, and it will scan it for you correctly and automatically, thus not requiring you to sit there and feed a stack of differently-sized papers one-by-one through the machine. I was mistaken however - the user manual says that you should sort your papers by different sizes and shapes before scanning them. When you do drop papers of different sizes in there, it will try to scan them, but the smaller sheets will be skewed and then incorrectly de-skewed.

3. Feeding stacks of paper into the scanner is a tad tricky - you have to wiggle it around a bit or the scanner will not be able to detect that any papers are in the ADF.

Canon also sells additional rollers so that you can replace them yourself without having to return the scanner to the manufacturer. If you use a Linux system, so long as you have a kernel that supports USB, a copy of VMWare (you can download a 30-day trial version for free) and a copy of Windows, the scanner works just fine.

I had been shopping for a scanner for a while. I have several files and needed to reduce my paper documents. I took the advice of the previous reviewer and purchased the DR-2080-C. It's simply superb. The speed of the scanner is marvelous. I was once at Best Buy and overhead a shopper saying that it doesn't matter what Canon makes, it's the best. I wholeheartedly agree with her.

This little thing can easily scan mountains of pages in short order and do it with clear easy to read reproduction. I don't know how Canon gets so much into this rather narrow case. I highly recommend the unit. And once you adjust the paper thickness control it will just keep scanning as long as you keep putting pages into the unit. The software allows you the option of continuing to scan once all loaded pages are finished so you can just keep adding to the same file. What's more the unit is TWAIN compatible which means you can use any software application such as Adobe Standard 8 to scan directly from this unit. As long as the software is TWAIN compliant your in. If you can take a file folder out of your file cabinet then you can scan it into your computer with this unit. It's that easy. Get one yourself and you'll see how easy it is to go paperless.

Every time I have to use this scanner, it is a nightmare. The worst: the paper feed. Canon rates 50 pages that you can put into the feeder. That is far from the truth. 3-5 is the max! If paper is folded or crumpled, you have to feed sheet after sheet and push it down manually.

Scanning photos does not work, since you have feed each one individually.

The wobbly paper feed does not allow to scan pages straight - ugly black rims remain on all sides.

The software is buggy, e.g. printing larger scans does simply not work. The menu structures are twisted and not user friendly.

I don't understand the good ratings here. According to my experience, this is a product to stay away from.

The scanner seems to do well with scanning to .pdf files. The OCR software does not seem very good, though, and the document feeder has not worked too well for me. Most frustrating is that the software for the scanner includes SPYWARE that Norton Antivirus has identified and cannot remove. My efforts to follow Norton instructions on how to remove the spyware from my registry also has not worked.

Shame on Canon.