Canon's imageFormula DR-M260 Office Document Scanner ($1,195) is a high-volume, sheet-fed desktop document scanner designed for heavy loads and document management systems in the legal, financial, healthcare, government, and several other industries. A fast, accurate scanner with capable document capture and conversion software, the DR-M260 faces stiff competition, including our current Editors' Choice, the somewhat faster and slightly more accurate Epson DS-870 Color Duplex Workgroup Document Scanner. While the less expensive Epson delivers a bit more value, the Canon DR-M260 is a terrific machine well worth your consideration.
Ready to Get Down to Business
At 9.1 by 11.2 by 10 inches with its trays closed and weighing just 7.5 pounds, the Canon is similar in size and girth to the Epson DS-870, as well as another PCMag top pick, the Alaris S2060w. Two other recent Editors' Choice desktop document models, Visioneer's somewhat beefier Patriot H60 and Brother's lower-volume but more versatile ImageCenter ADS-3600W, are both a little bigger and a few pounds heavier than today's imageFormula offering.
In any case, when you extend their input and output trays, all these and most other sheet-fed document digitizers triple in length, thereby increasing the desktop real estate required to operate.
Similar Products
Epson DS-870
Brother ImageCenter ADS-3600W
Alaris S2060w Scanner by Kodak Alaris
Visioneer Patriot H60
Compared to most of its rivals, the Canon DR-M260 sports a somewhat large but simple control panel consisting of several buttons (Up, Down, Menu, OK, Cancel, and Scan) anchored by a relatively spacious five-line, 2.5-inch monochrome LCD. You can make configuration changes and select predefined workflows or scan jobs from the panel, though this scanner (like most others) gets its versatility from the bundled software, which I'll dig into shortly.
One of the DR-M260's shortcomings, however, is that it's limited to USB connectivity, albeit the speedy USB 3.1 version. This restricts its availability to the single PC it's tethered to; you get no network or mobile support, which some would-be buyers will surely find inadequate. Canon offers two networking upgrade modules, Ethernet ($169) and Wi-Fi ($199). You can also get barcode reader modules, a passport carrier sheet, and an A4 carrier sheet through Canon and other outlets.
With its USB connectivity, the imageFormula is designed to interact with one computer; the scanner's bundled software does most of the heavy lifting, including defining job resolution and other parameters, converting scanned text to editable text, and distributing documents to their various destinations such as the cloud, a local drive, or a document management back-end application. It does not allow you to connect your handheld devices to the scanner as some of its competitors do.
Among the competitors listed here, the Epson and Visioneer also come with only USB connectivity (also upgradable via somewhat costly add-ons). The Alaris S2060w and Brother ADS-3600W, on the other hand, both support a multitude of connectivity options, including USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. The Brother also supports Near-Field Communication (NFC), a peer-to-peer networking protocol that lets you connect your smartphone or tablet to the scanner by simply tapping the mobile device on a hotspot on the latter's control panel. Furthermore, both the Alaris and Brother allow you to scan directly to USB thumb drives.
The DR-MR260's minimum document size is approximately 2 by 2 inches, and in long document mode it can capture pages with surface areas as large as 8.5 by 220 inches. Input capacity as measured by the size of its automatic document feeder (ADF) is 80 pages, and its daily duty cycle rated at 7,500 scans. The Epson's ADF holds 100 sheets, but its daily volume cap, like the Alaris scanner, is 7,000 pages; the Brother holds a meager 50 sheets, and its duty cycle is 2,000 scans per day less than the Canon's. The Patriot H60's feeder holds 120 sheets and it's good for 2,500 more scans per day than the DR-M260.
Potent Productivity Software
In addition to the industry-standard TWAIN and ISIS drivers that provide a wide range of connectivity across Windows programs ranging from Adobe Photoshop to Microsoft PowerPoint, the imageFormula DR-M260 comes with an impressive software bundle. The titles include Canon CaptureOnTouch, Canon CapturePerfect, and Kofax Virtual ReScan (VRS) Pro.
CaptureOnTouch's intuitive scanner interface and document management features let you quickly and efficiently scan documents and automatically distribute them to various nodes across your management system. A lighter mobile version provides similar functionality on both Apple and Android handhelds.
CapturePerfect allows you to scan and convert scanned files to PDF and TIFF. It also has some rudimentary document management and workflow features, such as Save Batch to Mail, Scan Batch to File, and Scan Batch to Printer. Kofax VRS is a utility that evaluates and enhances poor scans to improve accuracy.
High-Volume Speeds
Canon rates the DR-M260 at 60 one-sided pages per minute (ppm) or 120 two-sided images per minute (ipm, where each page side represents an image). When I tested it using our standard Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro and Canon's CaptureOnTouch software, it surpassed those ratings by about 2.3ppm and 5.3ipm.
But then, how fast pages zip through the machine doesn't really tell us much. What's more important is how quickly (and how well) the software converts the scanned text to a usable file format, which in our case is image or searchable PDF. The DR-M260 scanned and saved our one-sided 25-page text document to image PDF at the rate of 59.1ppm and our two-sided document (50 sides) at 115.7ipm.
These scores beat the Alaris S2060w by 2.8ppm and 9ipm, and topped the Brother ADS-3600W by 13.1ppm and 18.9ipm. The Epson DS-870 and the Visioneer Patriot H60, on the other hand, outpaced the DR-M260—the Epson was 9.9ppm and 23.3ipm quicker, and the Visioneer 9.9ppm and 23.7ipm quicker.
Next, I tested how well the DR-M260 scanned to a more usable format, searchable PDF. It scanned our two-sided 25-page text document in 53 seconds—5 seconds faster than the Alaris, 11 seconds slower than the Brother, 29 seconds behind the Epson, and 23 seconds slower than the Visioneer.
Superb Accuracy
Scanning text documents, of course, saves hours in typing. It stands to reason, then, that the more accurate the conversion from scanned to editable text, the better. Nowadays, most scanners—including inexpensive desktop and small portable and handheld models—and their software are highly precise. The DR-M260 and its bundled utilities are no exception.
I scanned and converted our Arial test document with zero errors down to 5 points and our Times New Roman pages mistake-free down to 6 points. That's about average but still highly accurate. (The span between average accuracy, in this regard, and the best is small.)
By comparison, the Alaris S2060w managed 8 points for both test fonts, and the Brother ADS-3600W and Visioneer Patriot H60 came in at 6 points for each font. The Epson DS-870, at 5 points for each font, turned in the best accuracy scores among this group of scanners. To its credit, the Canon model converted our decorative and display font samples a bit more precisely than the other models did.
More Than a Good Bet
As I noted earlier, the Canon imageFormula DR-M260 is not ideal out of the box for sharing across multiple computers or mobile devices. The Alaris S2060w and Brother ADS-3600W, though somewhat slower, are better suited for that. And for sheer speed, the Visioneer Patriot H60 is a good bet, as is the Epson DS-870.
The DR-M260 is part of a ferociously competitive group, but while nothing about it makes it clearly more desirable than our recent favorites, nothing counts it out, either. It's an excellent alternative and a capable high-volume scanner for most enterprises with serious document-digitizing requirements.
Though it's limited to a single desktop or laptop connection, Canon's imageFormula DR-M260 is a powerful, high-volume scanner with a robust software bundle, making it a good choice for busy document-management systems.
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