The Canon DR-2580C is an A4 scanner with a relatively large sheet feeder. It is competitively priced and designed to compete with the dominant Fujitsu Fi-5120C and Kodak i40 scanners. When compared to the Kodak and Fujitsu equivalent it scores well because it has a 100 sheet feeder rather than just 50, and doesn't rely on gravity for the feeding which helps prevent double-feeds and jams.
In the box, you'll find a USB cable, power leads, installation CD (which includes Capture Perfect), Adobe Acrobat (full version) and of course the scanner itself!
When looking at the DR-2580C, you'll be surprised just how small it is. As you can see from the picture, it isn't a great deal different in size to a standard office telephone, and it's very lightweight too. Based on the last two points you'd think that the scanner was flimsy and poorly built, but this isn't the case - for less than £500 it feels like a good, compact, solid unit. Canon are also releasing an updated version in the next couple of months that has addressed a couple of issues with the design - so the build quality on newer models will have improved.
Installation is easy, as with most of the Canon scanners. The only delay was peeling off all of the orange tape which is used to keep moving parts in place in transit.
For the tests we scanned the sample documents in Adobe Acrobat at 200dpi black and white.
100 A4 Pages...
When you first load the scanner, you'll probably wonder where to put the sheets. Unlike most other scanners, the DR-2580 doesn't have a designated feed tray. Instead, you load the paper in the gap at the front. Make sure that all of the paper is touching the surface, and that the surface is level, otherwise you may have trouble with feeding. The photo above shows where the paper sits prior to feeding.
It took the scanner exactly 4 minutes to scan the 100 sheets, which is spot on the quoted 25ppm figure from Canon. The pages all went through fine, although after around 50 sheets, the scanner started to make a strange vibrating noise - this turned out to be the output tray struggling with so many sheets. Whilst the input section of the scanner happily takes 100 pages, the output section isn't so good.
With the Canon DR-2580C you can either scan using the u-path (which makes the footprint a lot smaller but will increase the likelihood of double feeding and also risk bending any card or photos that are scanned), or the straight-through path (which means the pages are not bent at all.) To see if there was any difference in speed, we tried 25 pages through the straight-through setting, and again it took exactly 1 minute, so there is no time benefit in scanning this way.
The next test was to see how the scanner handled a mixed batch of invoices. The scanner didn't take this batch so well. Firstly, a small A5 piece was in amongst the batch - this was taken through with another page. And then the last three sheets went through together too. They were extremely thin, suggesting the scanner will struggle with anything below the standard 80gsm printer paper. The images from the thin paper were ineligible - an increase in the dpi and changing the brightness/contrast setting should fix this though.
This scanner has the added bonus of double feed detection. To set this, click on the "more" button in the scanner driver window and select one of the double feed detection options. We tried the invoice batch again with detection on, and it worked - the scanner stopped upon detecting that two sheets had gone through. An alert popped up on the PC too and explained it had detected a double feed. This is a very useful feature because you can trust the scanner to alert you rather than having to sit there watching it, or go through each batch and match the hard copy with the scanned copy.
While it is not recommended, but inevitable from time to time, we put a stapled document through the unit to see how it reacted. With the double feed detection off the scanner took it through without jamming. With double feed on it alerted us to the double feed and stopped scanning, exactly as it should.
(IMPORTANT NOTE: please remove all staples prior to scanning!!... No manufacturers recommend you scan staples, paperclips etc - this will very quickly scratch the scanning lens and will not be covered in your warranty!)
We tried a handful of pages in colour at 600dpi. The scanner took its time and after scanning around half of the first sheet it started to stall. We put this down to the fact we were using Adobe Acrobat to scan - which in the past we have had difficulties with when scanning colour documents at high resolutions. We tried it with Canon Capture Perfect software (supplied with the scanner) and all was fine.
To take advantage of the straight-through path, we tried a batch of business cards. All but one of the 20 cards scanned went through fine. The one that didn't struggled because it had a very shiny surface, so the rollers struggled to grip it.
On the left of the scanner, there are 3 function buttons which enable quick scanning. To set the functions, locate the DR-2580C in the Scanners and Cameras section within Control Panel on your PC. Right click on it and select properties. Click on the "events" tab and then select which button you'd like to program.
Conclusion
The Canon DR-2580C is a good little machine. It is very small and therefore will not take up a great deal of room on your desk. The design of the scanner is nice too! The only real problem we faced was the mixed batch of invoices triple-feeding - but by selecting the double feed detection, this issue causes less concern.
Please note that all of our reviews are based on one sample scanner and may not therefore be a statistically correct assessment of the model in question. Given the simplistic nature of the tests, in an attempt to keep the reviews comparable with other models, many of the features available to each model were not tested and we strongly recommend visitors to our website to view the official product specifications provided by the manufactures. Whilst all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure all information is accurate we accept no liability for any inaccuracies or omissions and any decisions based on information contained in this review are the sole responsibility of the visitor.
The Canon DR-2580C is an A4 scanner with a relatively large sheet feeder. It is competitively priced and designed to compete with the dominant Fujitsu Fi-5120C and Kodak i40 scanners. When compared to the Kodak and Fujitsu equivalent it scores well because it has a 100 sheet feeder rather than just 50, and doesn't rely on gravity for the feeding which helps prevent double-feeds and jams.
