Canon imageFORMULA RS40 – Photo and Document Scanner, Auto Document Feeder, Windows and Mac, Scans Old and New Photos in Varying Sizes, USB Interface

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!

Terrible product
I have never written a review for anything on Amazon. This product is by far the worst thing I have ever bought. It took hours for me to figure out why Canon’s software could not detect the scanner from my computer. When I did find the answer (which has to do with a glitch between Windows and the Capture On Touch app), the quality of the scan was terrible, and every place I tried to create a file to store the image on my computer, whether in Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., was also difficult to figure out. It’s too late for me to return this piece of garbage scanner. The review forced me to choose a star, but if I could it would be absolutely no stars.

It works very well. The software is good to make scans. Reliable so far.

I purchase this scanner with high hopes. Unfortunatly, the image quality, even after trying all kinds of settings combinations , just wasn’t good enough. I have several Canon flat bed scanners and multi-function printer/scanners, but really needed decent automated scanning to speed up the processing of hundreds of photographic prints. Compared to the results from a Canon 9000F Mark II, the colours are overly saturated and muddy, and the blacks are blotchy. The colours do not adequately represent the actual colours of the source photo. Too bad, but I have had to return it.