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IF YOU JUST consider the basic specs, you can't help but be impressed by Canon's new DR-9080C. With a suggested list price of $9,975, the DR-9080C costs thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, less than its would-be competitors, yet this sheetfed duplex production scanner combines fast color, grayscale and bitonal speeds with state-of-the-art features including auto deskew and ultrasonic double-feed detection. Canon has even invented a unique detection feature that prevents stapled documents from entering the paper path.
This all sounds too good to be true, but the DR-9080C does have its limitations, including a lack of third-party board support and an implausibly low rated duty cycle of 10,000 pages per day. There's no doubt that the DR-9080C and its lower-priced sibling the DR-6080C (a slower, bitonal/grayscale scanner) will shake up the production scanning market, but discriminating buyers should understand that specs alone don't tell the whole story. We brought Canon's newest top-of-the-line scanner into our lab to give you a full report.
Most of the mid- and high-volume production scanners we test arrive at our lab on a shipping pallet, but the DR-9080C is as small in size as it is in price. The scanner measures just 12.2 inches high, 18.1 inches wide and 20.7 deep. Despite this compact footprint, the scanner handles up to 12- by 17-inch documents with automatic document feeding and up to 12 by 39.2 inches in a manual bypass mode.
Like several leading document scanners introduced in the last year, the DR-9080C has a dual interface that lets you choose either SCSI-III or fast USB 2.0 connectivity. We chose the latter and had the scanner up and running in less than an hour. Canon recommends a PC with at least a 733 MHz processor or faster and 256 MB or more of RAM, but if you're spending close to $10,000 on this type of equipment, it only makes sense to spend an extra $1,000 to get an up-to-date machine with a fast processor, lots of memory and factory-installed USB 2.0 ports.
The DR-9080C may be priced like a departmental scanner, but its rated speeds are solidly in the high-volume production range at 90 letter-sized pages-per-minute (ppm) simplex and 180 images per minute (ipm) duplex in bitonal...