Canon imageFormula DR-3010C

Canon imageFormula DR-3010C

It's not often that the same product is both highly impressive and disappointing, but the Canon imageFormula DR-3010C ($800 street) manages exactly that trick. It's impressive, because it does well on every task a document scanner should do: namely, document management, optical character recognition (OCR), and business card management. It's disappointing, because it doesn't completely live up to expectations. In short, it's well worth considering but doesn't offer quite as much as it promises. Scanners in general, and most Canon scanners in particular, typically perform at or very close to their speed ratings. The Editor's Choice Canon DR-2580C ($875 street, 4.5 stars), for example - which I reviewed in 2005 but is still available - came in very close to its rating in our tests, at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scans and 50 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scans. Given that history, you'd expect the DR-3010C to turn in a speed close to its 40 ppm and 80 ipm ratings. In reality, though, if you use the default settings in the Canon scan utility that's designed for ease of use, it's a lot slower. (The scanner comes with a second utility as well, with different default settings.) The good news is that even with the default settings, it's still more than fast enough to be highly useable.