That and also the other day when attempting to put some more papers into my 4 drawer cabinet (http://tinyurl.com/mywmy7d), it almost fell over and killed me.
Now I know most companies will gladly stop sending me paper invoices in favor of electronic ones. But call me old fashioned, I really like having the point in time snapshot of services rendered sent to me by the company. Also, for the companies that forced me to switch to electronic statements, I never remember to go and download the statement at month's end.
Then an idea popped into my head, what if I keep getting paper statements, but I scan all of them, and then digitally store them, and then shred most of them and only keep the most important ones?
I have a very good digital storage and backup system, and if I ever run out of space, I am likely not to get crushed by the out of space error message on my computer.
Although I already have a very good flatbed scanner (an old HP Scanjet 6300C, yes, it is so old it has SCSI support) As good of a scanner as it is, it does not have an automatic document feeder, which without, would make scanning the mountain of paper take forever. So that was out.
On to the Internet I go to shop for a new toy!
I really only looked at black and white All In Ones lasers, basically something that can scan, fax, print, and had an ADF, and could do duplex scanning.
After some weeks of searching, it seems that the Canon MF4890DW got pretty good reviews on Amazon, and was quite affordable ($200 CAD at Staples.ca). I was also looking at some Brother printers, but the Brother laser AIOs don't offer duplex scanning until approx the $400 model. So even though there may be some laser toner hacks for the Brother, I figured I'd try the cheaper Canon first.
Btw, I did look at dedicated document scanners designed to do exactly the task I wanted, but these small devices were more expensive than the AIOs, and they didn't do printing or faxing. So I said "f*ck that, I'm getting an AIO!"
My first impression of the Canon MF4890DW is that it is nice enough to look at. However, quickly I started noticing that perhaps the designers looked more for form rather than function.
For example, the paper tray doesn't come out. I think every printer I've ever owned had a removable paper tray. It makes loading paper easy! Why Canon would change that is beyond me.
Then, there is the output tray. Well, it isn't so much of a tray as it is a bit of plastic that swings out. I realized it had to be swung out because when I did a test page after installing the drivers, the page prompted was ejected off my desk and flew half way across the room on my floor.
So I guess they don't expect you to be printing a lot in one go.
The MF4890DW supports both wired and wireless printing. I tried wireless first. Setting it up using WPS was easy enough, start the process on the printer, press the WPS button on my router, and voila, it's up.
Let's try scanning!
First I tried to scan the two test pages I printed. That was easy enough. They documents showed up in my computer as PDFs, wonderful! Exactly what I wanted!
Next I tried to scan a two pages, two sided bank statement. It scanned the first page, the flipped the sheet around in the ADF, and was just starting to suck the page back in to scan the back side when I hear "grrrr, errrrr..." and "Paper Jam" shows up on the LCD.
This is just your normal month end bank statement, printed on probably recycled paper, and folded twice and mailed. And no, this one had not been wrinkled or damaged, it was pristine.
I clear the jam by pulling the paper out, popping open the ADF and scanner. And then the printer says "Scan error, OK". Fine. Let's try again. So I put the document back in, and start up another scan.
After all the settings are inputted on the printer, I make it start, except it doesn't do anything. Then I noticed oh there is an error dialog on my computer too. And apparently, when that error dialog box is showing, the printer software doesn't respond to any further incoming requests.
I clear the error box on my computer, and wait, and still nothing. I cancel the scan on the printer, re-enter all the parameters, and make it scan again, and finally it goes again. When I say go, I really mean it gets to the exact same part, and then jams again.
Getting pretty annoyed at this time, I clear the jam again, except this time, the printer, while sensing my frustration, decides to up the ante. It doesn't notice I've cleared the jam, it continues to say "Paper jam" even when there is none. I press every button I can find on the printer, trying to hold down the Reset button, the Stop button, the Back button, but nothing, not a damn thing clears the paper jam state on the printer.
Left with no choice, I power cycle the printer and finally the jam clears.
I clear the error dialog on my computer before trying anything else.
Since so far I've only had success scanning two pages in one shot, I thought maybe I should just try to scan the document and duplex it manually.
After much wrangling with the MF Toolbox settings, I finally figure out how to do this. Which, in case you have the terrible fortune of owning a MF4890DW and want to scan a bunch of pages manually into one PDF, the trick is you cannot use the ADF UNLESS you have "Display driver settings" checked and select "Multiple page PDF", and select the "ADF 1 side" in the "Advanced driver settings". Yeah, ask me how I figured that out and I will tell you that a lot of swear words were involved.
Soooo, I am on the 3rd page of manually scanning this 4 page document manually through the ADF when it declares that a "Communication error has occured, blah blah blah", either I've unplugged the device or a black hole ate it. I have done neither. Remember this is all over WIFI, there is nothing to unplug! I check my wifi settings, nop, everything is fine. PS, before you blame my wifi setup, I will say it is very good, and the printer is only about 20 ft from the router (an Asus RT-N66U).
Maybe I did something wrong I thought. So I clear the error message, and start the entire process over again. First time I tried it in color, which scans slower, so the 2nd time, I thought maybe I'll just use B&W, I mean, I don't really need a full color bank statement anyway.
3rd page, boom, like clock work, communication error, device lost, scan aborted. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
Despite getting quite upset, I thought, ok, let's just try scanning a bunch of pages 1 sided, and see if it will do that right.
Wanna know what happens next? Yup, 3rd page, single sided B&W scanning, bamm, communication error!
So... wireless scanning... maybe not.
The ADF is suppose to hold 50 sheets, what good is it if it will only do 2 pages at a time? At this point I am wondering if it will do anymore than 2 pages at all. Maybe not over wireless, how about wired?
Plugging the printer over ethernet and confirming it picked up an IP address (after switching it from wireless to wired, it can only use one at a time). I try and try. But no matter what I do, I can't get it to actually use the wired connection and scan anything. My memory is a little blurry for this part, perhaps because I was so angry with it.
As a last resort, I pull out a USB cable, disconnect the wireless and pull out the ethernet cable, so it has no choice but to use the USB.
Again, I apologize, but this part too is a little blurry in my memory, as I was running through a lot of different settings. But the end result is the drivers that come with the printer for some reason don't work. I am running 64bit Windows 7, and I read somewhere on a forum that I need to update to the latest 64bit drivers. I find these drivers after more digging through Canon's website. Somewhere along the line it asks me to enter the serial number and I do so, only to have the website reject it saying it's invalid. Thanks Canon!
Anyway, after many frustrating hours, I finally have it up and running over USB.
Honestly I didn't even test printing on USB, since I have a perfectly working laser printer, the whole point of this device is the automated scanning!
Without writing another novel, let me report that scanning over USB works much better than over wireless.
It didn't die on the 3rd page. It will happily scan 25 page documents in one shot into one PDF. The single sided paper feed is quite tolerant actually, as some of those 25 pages were quite wrinkled and I was frankly surprised it fed without problems.
The duplex ADF scanning however, is extremely finicky at best. Unless the document you are trying to scan is just plain laser paper print outs, there is a high chance the duplex ADF scanning will jam when it tries to feed in the back side of the page to scan. I ran into many statements from banks, utility companies that refuse to be duplex ADF scanned. Some of them eventually did go if I fed the pages in feet first, but some didn't even like this method (which is more cumbersome because after scanning I'd have to use PDFSAM to rotate the document).
But by far, the most MOST terrible heinous part of the entire ordeal is that 90% of the time after clearing a paper jam, the printer doesn't detect the jam, and the only way around it is to power cycle it. Oh, and of course with every paper jam, you have to clear the computer's error dialog, and don't forget to delete the partially scanned file.
In summary, let's run through the pros and cons of the Canon MF4890DW:
Pros:
- $200 CAD is pretty affordable for something that's suppose to offer so much
- pretty good looking
- good number of dedicated buttons (Scan to PC1, Scan to PC2)
- automatic low power standby mode (I measured it with a Belkin Conserve Insight at 2W)
Cons:
- wireless scanning only works for ~2 pages then times out
- duplex ADF feeder is terrible and jams far too often
- no way of clearing paper jams other than power cycling the printer
- have to clear computer error dialog before scanning can continue
- drivers didn't work off the bat, had to search for updated 64bit drivers
- insane number of setting combinations:
- some allowing ADF use, some allowing ADF 2 sided, while others do not
- depending on the setting, selecting Multiple Page PDF may not prompt you to feed the second page, resulting in a single page PDF (and increasing anger, frustration, general feeling of throwing this device out the window)
The end result, I took it back to Staples today for a refund.
My second try is the Epson WF3540. Let's hope this experience is better. I don't know if I can handle another experience like the Canon without going Hulk Smash...
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