Canon ImageFormula DR-C125 review

The DR-C125 comes with a fairly substantial software bundle.

The DR-C125 comes with a fairly substantial software bundle that includes the usual OCR, business card scanning and PDF authoring applications, along with Evernote's increasingly common scan-to-cloud app. While comprehensive, Canon's setup program triggers separate installers for each application, which could prove tedious if you're rolling out multiple scanners. The bundle also contains a SharePoint plugin and a TWAIN driver, but perhaps of most interest is Canon's own, newly developed CaptureOnTouch software. This supports one-touch scans, where the operator simply loads paper, hits the scanner's start button and waits for the results to appear.

Canon's CaptureOnTouch scanning software is surprisingly useful.

Working together, the scanner and CaptureOnTouch make an excellent pair. Using the default, fully automatic setting, documents are captured, de-skewed and rotated where necessary before being displayed in a generously-sized preview. The software automatically switches between colour modes and between simplex and duplex, discarding blank pages and presenting the user with exactly what they expect. The results can be printed or emailed, saved as JPG or TIFF image files, or as a PDF with searchable text.

As usual we tried everything we could to upset the scanner's feed mechanism, repeatedly loading the same badly-sorted mix of documents comprising crisp A4 sheets, lightweight papers and tissue-thin magazine pages. Using the standard J-path we had no hitches at all, with even the magazine pages surviving multiple trips through the scanner without creasing or jamming. Notably, there was no evidence of images bleeding from one side to the other on even the thinnest pages. While one badly-centred magazine page defeated the automatic de-skew, the automatic orientation performed flawlessly.