Canon Dr 2020u Scanner Driver Download

[Eloisa Stawasz]

TheDR-2020U offers lots of impressive features, including reasonably fast scans in general and exceptionally fast scans to searchable PDF files, but two features in particular make it unusually capable for the price.

Setup and Software

Basic setup for the scanner is easy. The DR-2020U measures 7.1 by 17.3 by 15.8 inches (HWD). Despite the relatively large footprint, it's short enough so that if you can afford to give up the space on your desktop, you won't feel like it's towering over you. Like the GT-1500, it's designed to sit in landscape orientation, as seen from the front, with the front panel on one long side, and the lid opening towards the back.

Setup consists primarily of moving the 17.2- pound scanner into place, removing the packing materials, and unlocking the scan head. After you install the software, you can then plug in the power cord and USB cable. I installed the scanner on a Windows Vista system. According to Canon, it also comes with a combination ISIS and Twain scan driver, and two Canon scan utilities for Windows 7 32- and 64-bit, Vista SP2 64bit, XP SP3 32bit and SP2 64bit, and Windows 2000 SP4.

Canon also includes an assortment of highly useful programs for a document scanner: Adobe Acrobat Standard 9.0 for working with PDF files, Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management, OmniPage SE4 for optical character recognition (OCR), and Presto! BizCard 5 SE for business cards. According to Canon, all of the programs work in all the same operating systems as the drivers and scan utilities.

One minor issue is that software installation is more cumbersome that it should be. Instead of a single overall installation routine that asks what you want to install and then installs, it, you have to run five separate installation programs on three discs. In the case of the one disc with three of the programs, you even have to find each of the setup programs on the disc before you can run it. At worst, however, I'd call this a little cumbersome, rather than a serious problem.

For each definition, you can define settings that include file type (including image PDF, searchable PDF, BMP, TIFF, and JPG), color mode, resolution, and whether to scan in simplex (one side of a page), duplex, or duplex but skipping blank pages.

For those scan definitions you use often enough so you can remember arbitrary designations for them, you can also assign up to five scan definitions to buttons labeled A through E. Even better, if you forget which scan goes with which button, you can press one of the buttons, see the name for that definition on the LCD, and confirm that you've chosen the right one before starting the scan.

Even 600 ppi is more than you need for document scanning, however, so the claimed optical resolution isn't particularly important. The more relevant rating is for speed, at 20 pages per minute (ppm) and 40 images per minute (with 1 image on each side of a page) for grayscale or black and white at 200 ppi (a typical resolution for document scanning), and both 20 ppm and 20 ipm for color scans.

Like most Canon scanners, but unlike most other scanners, the DR-2020U doesn't slow down for text recognition. With Canon's CapturePerfect utility and the same 50-page text document in both cases, I timed the DR-2020U at 1 minute 23 seconds whether it was scanning to an image file or a searchable PDF file. In comparison, the NeatDesk scanner took about 1 minute for the image file, but 5:35 for the searchable file. One of the few scanners I've reviewed that did better was the Canon imageFormula DR-2580C, which took 59 seconds for an image PDF file and 1:01 for the searchable PDF version.

The DR-2020U did reasonably well on our OCR and business card tests as well. On our OCR tests, it read both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. On our business card tests, in combination with BizCard, it did an excellent job feeding stacks of cards through a separate ADF for cards, and a reasonably good job of recognizing the text on the cards as well as putting the information in the right fields. On our standard set of cards, almost half had one or two mistakes, but only 20 percent had more than that.

Other issues

Although you can obviously use the DR-2020U's flatbed for photos, the scanner doesn't come with a photo editor. By definition, the package as sold by Canon isn't meant for photo scanning. Even so, there's nothing to stop you from buying a photo editing program separately.

Other than the relatively cumbersome approach to installing software, the only other issue I ran into with the DR-2020U was that the E-mail button on the front panel doesn't work the way I would expect it to. Instead of launching an e-mail message on the computer, attaching the scanned document, and waiting for you to enter an address to send to, the E-mail button has to be set to always send to a specific -email address.

Having a predefined destination makes good sense for tasks that you repeat with some regularity, like scanning a weekly report to send to another office, and it's a useful approach that you can take advantage of for one or more of the 50 predefined scan jobs. But I expect a button labeled E-mail to let me define the address I'm emailing to. Fortunately, there's an easy alternative, in the form of a scan to e-mail command you can give through Canon's software, so it's hard to count this as more than a minor annoyance.

All told, the DR-2020U is an impressive document scanner. In addition to fast speed for scanning to searchable PDF format, it stands out for its duplex scanning, flatbed, and excellent control software for easy scanning from the front panel. It's also an easy winner as Editors' choice for flatbed document scanner in its price class.

The Canon imageFormula DR-2020U ($645 direct) looks like nothing so much as a neatly sawed off top section from a desktop laser MFP—a flatbed scanner, automatic document feeder (ADF), front panel buttons, and LCD for menu text, with no printer attached. More important, the similarity extends to a deeper level as well, with a focus on scanning documents. However, the DR-2020U is a far better document scanner than most MFPs, and better in many ways than most similarly priced document scanners as well. If you need a flatbed document scanner for a small office or workgroup, it definitely belongs near the top of your short list.

Setup and Software

\nBasic setup for the scanner is easy. The DR-2020U measures 7.1 by 17.3 by 15.8 inches (HWD). Despite the relatively large footprint, it's short enough so that if you can afford to give up the space on your desktop, you won't feel like it's towering over you. Like the GT-1500, it's designed to sit in landscape orientation, as seen from the front, with the front panel on one long side, and the lid opening towards the back.

The ISIS and Twain driver will let you use the DR-2020U with virtually any windows program that includes a scan command. The two Canon scan utilities—CapturePerfect and CaptureOnTouch—offer different approaches to scanning, so you can chose whichever you like better or whichever is the better fit for a given scan. Only CaptureOnTouch, for example, works with the front-panel scan buttons.

Most document scanners offer a similar feature, but they typically limit you to either 9 or 10 definitions and show the choices only as numbers. Canon lets you define up to 50 scan jobs—an enormous number—and give them descriptive names that show on the LCD menu. Instead of having to memorize which number goes with which type of scan, you can simply scroll through the list to pick the definition you want to use.

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