Hardware

Review: Canon imageFORMULA DR-C225 II Document Scanner Is Perfect For a Home Office

Simple, fast and versatile, this lightweight scanner is packed with features.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

While mass remote work has gone surprisingly well in the wake of the pandemic, many home-based workers have found the need to add more capabilities to their home offices. The Canon imageFORMULA DR-C225 II office document scanner fits that role, performing this critical function well for both home-based workers and those back at the office.

The DR-C225 II is a new and improved model of the classic Canon scanner. It sits upright in a very small footprint, and at just 9.3 pounds, it’s practically portable. Setting up the scanner takes only a few seconds because Canon has completely streamlined the user interface. At the most basic level, you simply plug in the USB 2.0 cable, load up the documents you want to scan, and hit a single button to begin.

Designed for optical character recognition, the DR-C255 II can handle a variety of media types. It can scan typical documents printed on office paper in standard or legal-size formats, but in our testing it also easily scanned receipts, business cards, photos, plastic and embossed cards (such as a driver’s license), reports, contracts, and documents on heavy or colored paper. Document width tops out at 8.5 inches but can be up to 118 inches long. And as a full duplex scanner, the DR-C255 II can scan both sides of documents at the same time.

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The Canon DR-C225 Scanning Documents With Greater Speed

The Canon scanner is also surprisingly speedy, given its size. Almost any type of document, whether color or black and white, quickly pushes through the 30-page feeder. The DR-C255 II has a maximum speed rating of up to 25 pages per minute, and in my tests, it stayed pretty close to that regardless of the type of documents I fed it.

There are also quite a few options regarding output, including the ability to scan to either a PDF or JPG file. Those images can also be sent directly to a cloud repository, such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

The scanned documents are extremely accurate representations of the originals. With 600 dpi resolution and 24-bit color depth, the scanner does not miss much. Even documents with very fine or faint lines scanned perfectly over many tests.

Canon has fielded a solid business tool with the DR-C225 II document scanner. It’s small, fast, accurate and easy to use. It should find a good home in almost any workplace, including a home office.

The Benefits of Optical Character Recognition

Business users will likely employ the Canon imageFORMULA DR-C225 II office document scanner to capture things such as receipts or contracts, where having an exact facsimile of the original document is important. But sometimes, it’s the text or other data on the document that matters most, and not the actual document or its format.

In situations like that, you need the ability to perform optical character recognition. Thankfully, the DR-C255 II comes with OCR capability. You simply navigate to that part of the menu and select OCR as an option before a scan.

The scanning process for OCR is identical to capturing the entire document. However, the output is just text. Things like embedded graphics or the color of the original paper are discarded. That can save a lot of storage space, and also allows users to scan the information into an easily editable format, which isn’t possible with PDF or JPG files.

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That’s just one of the features the Canon imageFORMULA DR-C225 II office document scanner offers. Most of the features of the bundled scanning software are optional because the unit is designed to be extremely easy to use, but there is a lot of functionality included if needed.

For example, there is a business card organizer tool, which can be very helpful for business travelers who collect a lot of cards and need to keep them organized and searchable. And all the tools work with both Windows and Mac devices.

In addition to the bundled software and features, the Cannon DR-C255 also comes with TWAIN driver support. That enables the scanner to seamlessly connect with just about any program or platform designed to work with peripherals, making it a powerful and flexible tool that users can employ however they need to advance their business goals.