Canon MX860 ADF – the last laugh

Not so rosy…

Although the Duplex ADF is great, I’ve just realised that it will turn over each page individually, as it is spit out, for Duplex scanning only. So: if you put in 5 duplex pages in page order 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10;  then it will come out in order 2,1,4,3,6,5,8,7,10,9.

If you want to keep the documents afterwards – not great!

I guess you could put either manually flip them over;  or scan them again to reorder them(!);  but perhaps easiest is just to use MS Office Scanning, which scans in Simplex, but will run through one side, and then the other. So – again – not much smarter than a far simpler printer!

Canon MX860 – getting a normal scan

Canon MX860 Drive Dialogue

Following a bit more troubleshooting, I’ve found that opting to use the full drivers will work.
So:
- In your chosen Imaging app, choose to Open Drivers once scanning starts
- Let the driver open – choose Advanced mode
- Choose Document (ADF Duplex) as the document source.

Now – as for the rest of the settings, the defaults seemed to work OK – even though some, like Auto Tone, were defaulted to ON. It seems that just using the driver overrides the autocorrection options that were causing the problem. Note that selecting the paper source as Document (ADF Duplex), seems to be different to doing the same on the printer itself, where that profile also contains the autocorrection.

So – I’m limited to scanning via USB, as before, and I’m not really getting a lot more for my money than I was with my £10 third-hand HP Officejet V40. In fact, with the V40, the straight scan path meant I could scan stapled documents – something I’m not going to try here.

Canon MX860 – images appear washed out

So, I’m now trying to use my Canon in anger, to scan some documents, and have found something that is actually making me angry.

If you scan a colour document, it will perform some kind of optimisation that will wash out normal colours; it seems to apply contrast and brightening in one. I expect this is for archiving/smaller file size/better OCR performance. This didn’t seem so bad, but then it came to scanning some receipts and an MOT document. Anything with faint machine-type, became almost unreadable once scanned.

Some playing around, revealed that it IS capable of scanning with ‘normal’ contrast, but this is actually quite difficult. If I force it into photo mode, then it doesn’t apply the colour correction, and faint type is still visible.

However – that’s easier said than done. For example:
- If scanning to the MP Navigator software, it’ll automatically use the Document mode: even if I tell it to scan colour photo, and turn all correction off
- If scanning direct to memory card, then there are 4 options: Document (Platen), Photo (Platen), Document (ADF Simplex), Document (ADF Duplex). Of these, only Photo (Platen) gives the required results. Of course, that means there’s no ADF option for scanning without washed-out effects
- If scanning using other software (eg. MS Office Scanning), then there are two driver options. The native one (Canon MX860 ser_xxxxx) gives the same washed-out appearance as before. The WIA Driver (Canon MX860 WIA, Windows-compatible) DOES keep the detail in the picture. However – THAT driver doesn’t support the ADF, or any other scanner features. Even playing around with MS Office Scanning, the best I can get is to scan one side, then feed the paper back in the other way around, and scan the other. So why pay for the duplex ADF?

I’ve phoned Canon Support – and a UK-based agent answered within 2 minutes, which was really impressive. However – they tell me there’s absolutely no way of changing the default settings on the scanner itself, so I’m restricted to this basic, manual method of scanning.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment below.