While these days the vast majority of images are taken on peoples phones it’s not that many years ago that they were taken on cameras and only a little longer ago they were taken on film with a negative that gave a printed image. So there are still a great number of irreplaceable images that exist only as a printed photograph and each time they are taken from an album the chance of damage happening is increased so get an image now while you still can.
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The Canon imageFORMULA RS40 Photo and Document Scanner measures 31cm wide, 17cm from front to back although this increases to 36cm when the receiving tray is extended and 26cm tall.
There are folded sheets with Getting Started instructions in several languages. Basically remove the tape and one orange plastic shield. Plug the DC lead into the back of the unit as well as the USB lead, connect the power lead to the DC adapter and then download 372MB of installation files, these are heavily compressed to around one quarter of their expanded size. Once installed you have a folder to download to your PC. One folder to manipulate and improve the images and a User Guide to help you do the right thing to improve your images.
While it is designed to salvage and even improve photographs it can scan anything up to A4 and even scan both sides at the same time, by default everything is saved as .PDF.
Photos are placed face down top first in the rear sit up tray and delivered after scanning flat at the base of the unit so they travel less than 90 degrees in total great for images that may have become brittle or are folded or torn over the years.
You can create up to nine different processes – three are already created – so it then becomes a one touch selection.
There are four buttons on the front of the scanner and one LED and in most cases the only one you will use is the on/off as by default you instigate from the PC.
Some manipulation is carried out during scanning such as removal of ‘red eye’ but the software can do much more. One of the defaults is double sided – unlikely to be used for photos – but I found on my tests this did not work correctly all of the time.
A rare beast a scanner for photographs as most will use a printer that also scans and copies and indeed a flatbed may be safer for old and creased photos but in my tests I never had a feeding jam.
At the time of publication the Canon Scanner RS40 is available from Amazon for £455.
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