Canon imageFormula DR-S130 review: A great choice for remote workers

Canon offers a whole family of desktop scanners, but the imageFormula DR-S130 is compact and affordable enough to suit home workers as well as small offices. It supports both USB and wireless connections, promises a good 30ppm scan speed and is very easy to use, thanks to a 4.3in colour touchscreen.

That’s not to say it can only handle basic tasks. Canon’s CaptureOnTouch V4 Pro utility lets you define all sorts of advanced scanning jobs: to get the best from the 60-page document feeder you can scan a whole batch of documents in one go, and have them automatically separated by page counts, bar codes, zonal OCR, patch codes or blank pages.

Getting set up is a breeze. A single installation utility loaded all the requisite drivers and software on our Windows 10 host in under 15 minutes. It also provided a tool to assist with wireless connections, and mobile users can download the free iOS and Android apps.

The scanner defaults to a USB connection, but this is easily changed via the touchscreen. You just need to tap on the desired SSID in the wireless menu to connect – and support for WPS connections means you don’t even have to enter a password. Once you’ve configured your Wi-Fi connection, you can swap back and forth between interfaces with a few taps, should you wish to.

The CaptureOnTouch software is very capable, allowing you to set up scan shortcuts with predefined scan modes and destinations. Document profiles govern settings such as colour or greyscale scanning, resolution, simplex or duplex modes and various image-manipulation options such as anti-skew and image rotation.

Output profiles determine where your scans should be sent, with options including local or network folders, printers, SharePoint and FTP servers, custom applications and even your locally installed email client. The cloud gets a look in too (sort of): you can tell the software to scan to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or SugarSync, but all this actually does is save the scan to your local sync folder.

Once you’ve set your shortcuts, they can be assigned to soft buttons that appear on the scanner’s touchscreen for one-tap selection. You can create up to 100 assignments, and if other users on the network have CaptureOnTouch installed then the menu also lets you scan directly over the network to them.

When the scanner is in wireless mode, you can log into it from a browser to access a basic management interface. Here you can set a password, configure your network settings or assign a PIN to restrict touchscreen access. You can also enable SNMP for remote monitoring – something you don’t often see on an entry-level desktop scanner.

In use, we found the DR-S130 delivered perfectly on its performance promises. Our pile of 30 bank statements was scanned in 59 seconds, regardless of whether we chose 200dpi greyscale or 300dpi colour settings. The connection interface didn’t make a difference, either – we saw identical speeds over both USB and wireless.

As usual, what does incur a performance penalty is stepping up to the maximum 600dpi resolution: we saw greyscale and colour speeds tumble to 16.5ppm and 7.6ppm respectively. You’ll rarely need to use this setting, though, as the 200dpi resolution is perfectly adequate for creating document archives and accurate searchable PDFs.

Paper handling is impeccable. The DR-S130 had no problems with our mix of bank statements, till receipts and waybills, and on the rare occasion when something got jammed, the scanner reacted quickly before anything could get damaged. Passports can be scanned too, although these must be put in Canon’s optional carrier sheets first, and you’ll have to specify the right document type in the settings as otherwise the double feed detector can get confused.

All told, Canon’s imageFormula DR-S130 is a great choice for SMBs and small remote offices. It’s easy to use, yet not short on sophisticated features, speed and output quality are both up to scratch – and it’s great value.

Canon imageFormula DR-S130 specifications