Canon DR-C240 Scanner Driver Download– If you’re in the market for a workgroup or small office document scanner—or a faster-than-usual, priceless personal model—the Canon imageFormula DR-C240 is a strong contender.
It’s small enough to fit comfortably on your desk and designed to scan large piles of paper in a hurry, with a 60-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) and a 45-page per minute (ppm) rating. It doesn’t come with all the apps you might need, but it mostly makes up for its capable scanning utility and fast performance.
The DR-C240 is one of the more impressive choices in the scanner category, which includes the Epson WorkForce DS-760 Color Document Scanner and Xerox DocuMate 5445. All three offer similar ADF speed and capacity ratings, and all three are worth considering.
Each model offers more than the other in at least one key area. The Epson DS-760, for example, delivered the fastest speed of the three in our tests for scanning to image PDF format, while the DR-C240 provided the fastest speed for scanning to searchable PDF format.
The Xerox 5445, our place of choice is that it comes with the most comprehensive software of the three, with top-tier applications for document management and optical character recognition (OCR), plus an equally powerful PDF utility. With the DR-C240 or Epson DS-760, you must purchase one or more equivalent programs separately if you need them.
Settings and Software
The DR-C240 weighs 6 pounds 3 ounces and measures just nine by 11.4 by 9.9 inches (HWD) with the tray closed, making it small enough to share a table. The setup is typical for a USB-connected scanner:
- Plug in the power cable.
- Install the software from the disc.
- Connect the included USB cable.
The only standard business application Canon provides with the scanner is Nuance eCopy PDF Pro Office, a world-class PDF utility that can also function as a basic OCR program. Besides being able to scan and save to PDF images or searchable PDF files, it can also convert existing scans or files to various other formats, including editable text, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel.
The DR-C240 also comes with Kofax Virtual Rescan (VRS), a scan driver, and two of Canon’s very capable scanning utilities (CapturePerfect 3.1 and CaptureOnTouch). VRS is the leading program for making hard-to-read scans legible. Its digital enhancement options remove background shadows, doodles, highlighting, stray marks, and other unwanted items that can hide the information you want to see.
Scan drivers—for Twain ISIS and WIA—allow you to scan directly from almost any Windows program with the scan command. The scanning utility lets you scan directly to searchable PDF format, which is generally the most useful option for document management and can also scan to multiple destinations, including your email and printer. CaptureOnTouch also includes a plug-in that lets you scan directly to various cloud sites, including Evernote, OneDrive, SugarSync, Dropbox, and Microsoft Sharepoint.
Performance
Like most document scanners, the DR-C240 offers a resolution of 600 pixels per inch (PPI). For most of our tests, I used CaptureOnTouch and set it to 200ppi, which is the program’s default setting for documents. I also used the grayscale mode, which Canon sets at 45ppm and 90 images per minute (ipm), with one image on each side of the page. The black-and-white model has the same rating as the grayscale, but the color mode is slower, at 30ppm and 60ipm.
When scanning our standard 25-sheet test document to image PDF format, the DR-C240 moved slower than its rating, at 40ppm for simplex (single-sided) scanning and 78ipm for duplex (two-sided) scanning, including the lag between completing the scan and completing the save.
Files to disk. No lag matches the promised speed on which the rating is based. In comparison, the Epson DS-760 was slightly faster for the total time, at 42ppm and 83ipm, and the Xerox 5445 was slightly slower, at 39ppm and 75ipm.
Unlike most scanners—including Epson and Xerox models—the DR-C240 doesn’t add much time for text recognition when you scan to a searchable PDF format. He was ahead of both competitors by a wide margin.
Scanning a 25-sheet document in duplex, I calculated a total time of 47 seconds from start to finish, compared to 40 seconds to scan to an image PDF format. The Epson DS-760 takes 1 minute 15 seconds for this task. Xerox DocuMate takes 1:18.
The DR-C240 is also very good at OCR accuracy. The scanner and software combination read our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 5 points without error, beating the Epson and Xerox models in both cases.
It’s also nearly as good at an assortment of fonts that we don’t usually report on as most scanners do poorly. The DR-C240 managed to read these two hard-to-spot fonts at five dots and two at six dots without error.
Conclusion
All three scanners are worth considering, and each has at least one advantage over the other. If you need the apps included with the Xerox 5445, it deserves a close look as the best value among the three.
If you don’t need any additional applications and expect to scan primarily to PDF image formats, the Epson DS-760’s extra speed will make it an attractive alternative. However, if you are more concerned with OCR accuracy or scanning to a searchable PDF format, the Canon imageFormula DR-C240 has a clear advantage.
