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Pros
- Automatic document feeder.
- Rated at 15 pages per minute for black-and-white and grayscale scans.
- Duplexes.
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Cons
- Relatively large and heavy for a portable scanner.
- Initial setup is a touch harder than it should be.
Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini Specs
| Automatic Document Feeder: | Yes |
| Ethernet Interface: | No |
| Flatbed: | No |
| Maximum Optical Resolution: | 600 pixels |
| Maximum Scan Area: | Legal |
| Mechanical Resolution: | 600 pixels |
| One-Touch Buttons: | Yes |
| Scanning Options: | Reflective |
| USB or FireWire Interface: | USB |
The smallest scanners, like the one that's part of The Neat Company's 
) package, weigh less than a pound and are about the size of a stack of 1-foot rulers. The P-150 is about double that in size and weight, at 1.6 by 11 by 3.7 inches (HWD), and 2.1 pounds. Unlike smaller scanners, however, it's not limited to manual feeding, simplex scans (one side of a page), and barely tolerable scan speeds.
Canon has managed to shoehorn a 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) into the P-150, along with duplexing (scanning both sides of a page at the same time) capabilities. Its speed would be a reasonable clip for a desktop scanner, at 15 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and grayscale scans and 30 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scans. In color mode, it's rated at a still reasonable 10 ppm and 20 ipm.
Setup
Setup is a touch harder than with most portable scanners, because you have to install a separator pad—a replaceable part that helps feed the paper properly. Figuring out how to install it is a bit of a puzzle, thanks to unclear instructions. Once you solve the puzzle and successfully snap the pad into place, however, the rest of the setup is easy.
In a particularly unusual touch, the P-150 lets you either install software or not. The scanner stores a simple scan utility in memory. The memory looks like a drive to your computer when you connect by USB cable; the utility, CaptureOnTouch Lite, lets you scan without installing anything on the computer. If you choose this route, setting up the scanner, even the first time, involves no more than plugging in one or both of the supplied cables, running the program or letting it run automatically if your computer's set to allow it, and then scanning.
If you choose to install software instead of using CaptureOnTouch Lite, initial setup is more conventional, with an automated installation program that installs the full version of CaptureOnTouch, with additional features; Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management and optical character recognition (OCR); NewSoft Presto! BizCard 5 SE for scanning and managing business cards; and a combined Twain and ISIS driver that will let you scan directly from virtually any program with a scan command.
I tested the P-150 on a system running Windows Vista. According to Canon, it also comes with a full set of drivers and software for Windows 7, 2000, and XP. In addition, you can download the Mac version of CaptureOnTouch and the Mac Twain driver for Mac OS X version 10.3 through 10.6 from Canon's Web site. Canon says it's expecting to ship a Mac version of the scanner as well—possibly by the time you read this—with a full set of Mac software, but the details of what will be in the package have not yet been decided.
Making Choices
I tried all four approaches to using the scanner—both with one cable and two in combination with both the embedded software and full software installation.
It turns out that whether you can actually benefit from two cables is something you'll have to experiment with to find out. Not all USB ports supply the same power level—an issue that matters mostly for laptops—so you may not get sufficient power to run at full speed even using both cables. However, in my tests with a desktop system, the scanner essentially matched its rated speed even with one cable, and I saw no significant difference with either software option when I added a second cable.
The choice between installing and not installing the software is easy: Install it unless you have a good reason not to. The embedded utility can't do anything but scan files to image format. You might find it useful under special circumstances, but it's simply too limited for most purposes.
Speed
The P-150's optical resolution is 600 pixels per inch (ppi), but its default setting is 200 ppi, which is usually sufficient for text documents. In my tests in the default scan mode, at 200 ppi and color, the speed was close to the 10 ppm and 20 ipm ratings, at 10.3 ppm for scanning a 25-sheet document to image PDF format in simplex mode, and 19.2 ipm for scanning the same document in duplex mode. By any measure, these speeds are noteworthy for a portable scanner. As a point of reference, I timed the )—a similarly priced, but larger and heavier, competitor—at 8.1 ppm for simplex scans and 15.6 ipm for duplex scans.
The full version of the CaptureOnTouch utility can scan to several formats besides image PDF files, including searchable PDFs. Adding the OCR step took only a few seconds longer than scanning and saving to image PDF format, a trick I've seen on other Canon scanners but never before on a portable scanner. I timed it at an impressively fast 2:40 for scanning our standard 25-sheet text document in duplex mode, recognizing the text on all 50 pages, and saving the file to disk. That's far faster than the S300, which took 3:08 for scanning and saving a 10-sheet section of the same document, with only 20 text pages.
The combination of scanning with the P-150 and moving the file to Word format using PaperPort scored reasonably well on accuracy, reading our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 10 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake.
The scanner didn't score particularly well for business cards, with the bundled software making at least one mistake on more than half of the cards in our standard test suite. However, the P-150 itself did a great job of feeding stacks of multiple cards. If you choose to invest in better software, the P-150 hardware is well equipped to scan cards.
One last feature worth mention is a color dropout option in the driver. If you scan pages printed on color paper in black-and-white mode, the pages often come out solid black. The color dropout option can make the text appear—as I proved in my tests with a document printed on orange paper. Even documents printed on white paper often have similar issues with highlighted text, a situation where this feature can come in handy as well.
Despite the wimpy business card software and the minor installation issue with the separator pad, the P-150 is an impressive enough package to earn Editors' Choice. The scanner itself is fast and well designed; even the business card software is good enough to be useful; and the Twain and Isis driver will let you scan with any other software you like. If you need a portable scanner—or even a small scanner for your desktop—it will be hard to find a better balance of speed, capability, and price.
COMPARISON TABLE
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