Canon imageFormula P-215 Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner

A close cousin to the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini ($295 direct, 4 stars), and one small step up in Canon's line, the Canon imageFormula P-215 Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner ($325 direct) combines a not quite identical scanner with improved software. The result is an even more attractive package, both as a portable scanner and as a small-size personal desktop scanner. It's also the new Editors' Choice for its category.

The P-215 is so similar to the P-150 that it's hard to see a difference. At 1.6 by 11.2 by 3.7 inches (HWD) and 2.2 pounds, it's just a little bigger (by 0.2 inches in one dimension), a little heavier (by 0.1 pound), and costs just a little more. However it's otherwise nearly identical, with a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF), duplexing (the ability to scan both sides of a page simultaneously), and even the same claimed speed.

Canon rates both scanners in both grayscale and black and white modes at 15 pages per minute (ppm) for both simplex (one-sided) and duplex (two-sided) scans, and at 30 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (with one image on each side of the page). Color mode is a still reasonable 10 ppm and 20 ipm. Beyond that, the scanners share most of their specifications point for point. However, Canon says that the P-215 adds the ability to scan hard plastic cards, like embossed ID cards and driver licenses.

Setup
One welcome improvement for the P-215 is easier setup for the scanner itself. With the P-150 you had to install a part in the scanner by following confusing instructions. The P-215 comes out of the box ready to work. Setup can be as simple as connecting the supplied USB cable. However, you also have other choices.

The P-215 gets power over the same USB cable it uses for data. It can also get additional power from an optional AC power supply (although it's not available at this writing) or from a second supplied cable that plugs into the scanner's power supply connector on one end and a second computer USB port on the other. Canon says that using the power supply or second cable will boost scan speed, but I didn't see any difference in my tests. Given that different USB ports can supply different levels of power, you may or may not see a difference on your computer.

Software choices
You also have the option whether or not to install software. If you don't want to install any, you can use the Canon CaptureOnTouch Lite utility stored in the scanner's memory. Connect by USB cable, and the computer will see the memory as a USB drive. Depending on how your computer is set up, it will then either launch the utility automatically or let you run it manually.

Alternatively, you can install the full version of CaptureOnTouch, which gives you much more control over the scan settings. You can also install a Twain driver, which will let you scan directly from most Windows programs; Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management and optical character recognition (OCR); NewSoft Presto! BizCard 6 SE for scanning and managing business cards; and connectors for Google Docs, Evernote, and Microsoft Sharepoint.

The software installation is mostly standard. However, it suffers from the same issue as the installation program for the Canon imageFormula DR-C125 ($495 direct, 4 stars) that I recently reviewed. During installation, you need to choose between a Typical or Custom install. With most scanners, the Typical option would install everything. With the P-215, however, it installs only the driver, scan utility, and user manual.

As I pointed out in the DR-C125 review, these choices really should be labeled Minimal and With Programs. At the very least, there should be some additional information explaining what each choice installs. Without it you may well go ahead with the Typical choice and never know that there are other programs available or how to install them.

Choosing Software
I tested the P-215 on a system running Windows Vista and with all four setup options?using one cable and two in combination both with CaptureOnTouch Lite and with the full set of installed software. Adding the second connection made no difference in speed with either software choice. However, the software makes a noticeable difference in usability.

CaptureOnTouch Lite will let you scan to searchable PDF files as well as image PDF, JPG, BMP, and other image file formats. The full version of the utility adds much more control over scan settings, while PaperPort and BizCard 6 add document management, the ability to recognize text and save it in editable format, and the ability to scan and manage business cards. What this adds up to is that unless you have a very good reason not to, you should install the software on your hard disk.

Performance
The P-215 offers a 600 pixel per inch (ppi) optical resolution, which is much more than you need for document scanning. Its default setting is 200 ppi, which is generally sufficient. In my tests, using the default settings of 200 ppi and automatic color detection, scanning to a PDF file, and giving the scan command from PaperPort, a 10 page document in both simplex and duplex modes matched the claimed 10 ppm and 20 ipm for color scans, but took an extra 35 seconds to save the file, so the effective speed was 6.3 ppm and 12.6 ipm. That's an acceptable speed even for a personal desktop scanner. For a portable scanner it's blazingly fast.

Much more important is that the P-215 doesn't slow down when you scan directly to a searchable PDF file. Only a few other scanners, mostly from Canon, can manage this trick. The DR-C125, for example, doesn't slow down at all for text recognition, and the P-150 adds just a few seconds. In contrast, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 ($295, 3.5 stars), like most scanners, takes a significant amount of extra time for text recognition, at 1 minute 43 seconds to scan 10 pages and save to an image file, compared with 2:37 to scan and recognize the text.

In addition to its fast scan speed, the P-215 scored well on our other tests also. Scanning to Word format, the combination of the scanner and PaperPort read our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 5 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake. Few scanners we've tested have done anywhere near as well for OCR accuracy.

Results for business cards were mixed. The scanner had trouble feeding stacks of cards, so I needed to manually feed some of them one at a time. The speed was also slow enough?at about 25 seconds per card?that a fast typist could do the job in less time than it takes to scan and then check the results. However, the accuracy was good enough to be useful, with errors on fewer than half of the cards, and most of those having only one or two errors.

Despite the lackluster results on our business card tests, the Canon imageFormula P-215 Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner is more than a little impressive. It's fast, particularly for scanning to searchable PDF format; it offers an ADF and duplexing; and its text recognition is unusually accurate. The combination makes it a standout winner, both as a capable personal desktop scanner and even more so as a portable scanner that doesn't force you to make compromises. By any measure, it's an easy pick for Editors' Choice.

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