Canon ImageFormula DR-6030C review

Canon's ImageFormula DR-6030C drops into the company's huge range of professional scanners, replacing the DR-5010C. Like the outgoing model, whose paper handling mechanism it shares, the DR-6030C is a small-volume production sheet scanner. It's designed for anything up to 10,000 scans a day and can get through 60 A4 pages per minute, scanning either the top or bottom side, or both in a single pass.

While it's compact, being smaller than most consumer-level, desktop mono laser printers, the DR-6030C can accommodate A3 originals. That gives its paper transport the width to also handle A4 paper in landscape orientation, upping its maximum A4 scan rate to 80ppm. That's not its only trick; flipping down a rear panel opens a straight paper path, which Canon says is good for media up to a heavyweight 546gsm.

Although squat, the DR-6030C is remarkably heavy thanks to robust plastics, which are all screwed down onto a metal base. Setting it up involves removing countless bits of orange packing tape, but it's otherwise quick and easy. Everything feels incredibly well put together, with the exception of the so-called document eject guide, a slot-in plastic spike designed to beef up the output tray. We found it was far too easy to knock the tray upwards, unhooking the spike which then needs to be refitted.

With an input capacity of 100 sheets, the DR-6030C is designed with attended batch scans in mind, and as such there are USB and SCSI interfaces for connection to a workstation, but no network port. Canon doesn't give recommended minimum specifications for the host PC, but our tests suggest that it doesn't need to be anything special for everyday jobs. That said, there are many image-processing features in the driver such as text orientation recognition. Switching them on adds a significant processor overhead, so if you want to use these features we'd opt for a computer with a modern multi-core processor to keep things moving smoothly.