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REVIEW:

Colortrac SmartLF Ci 40 large format scanner

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Scan-to-Copy

All Colortrac SmartLF scanners are supplied with SmartLF All-in-One software. This includes basic scan and copy facilities and allows you to copy to any Windows large format or office printer.

The ScanWorks software reviewed here also has a basic print command that allows you to print what is visible on the screen to a Windows printer.

In both cases, everything to do with the print - number of copies, scaling etc. - is controlled by standard Windows printer drivers. This means that prints can be unpredictable. Anyone with a serious copying requirement should look at Colortrac's dedicated CopySmart copying software. This costs £295 or US $580.

WIA Support

The SmartLF Ci 40 uses the standard WIA (Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition) interface rather than the TWAIN interface which is used by Graphtec and Contex.

Much like TWAIN, WIA support allows scanning directly into any software that supports WIA. Unfortunately, Colortrac uses the standard WIA interface, which is a dog's dinner.

The WIA interface allows you to choose between a colour scan, a greyscale scan and a black and white scan. You can select a scan resolution and brightness and contrast and you can select a paper size - but the paper sizes are jumbled in a drop-down in no logical order. Although D size and E size paper sizes are included, the biggest listed ISO paper size is A2.

The basic WIA interface is not really an issue if you are scanning into an application which has lots of image clean-up tools, but a lack of support for large ISO paper sizes is not what you would expect in a large format scanner.

(Note: WIA support is only active when the scanner is connected to a PC via USB.)

(Note: At the time of writing, Colortrac has temporarily suspended its WIA support but expects to reinstate it shortly.)

Network Scanning

The Ci 40 has an Ethernet connection which makes it possible to scan across a network. The procedure is as follows:

Assign the scanner an IP address. Then on each PC you want to scan from:

  1. Install ScanWorks or SmartLF software (if you are using ScanWorks, you also need to install a HASP driver, as ScanWorks is dongle protected).
  2. Install the Ci 40 Ethernet driver.
  3. Open up ScanWorks or SmartLF and set the scanner's IP address in the software.

You are now able to scan as though the scanner was connected to the PC by USB.

We found that scanning over our network was on average 1.4 times slower than scanning via USB for 200 dpi mono, greyscale and colour scans and for 400 dpi mono and greyscale scans. We found it was around two times slower for 400 dpi colour scans.

NOTE: Although our hub is a 1 Gbit hub, our PCs contain 100Base-T network cards, so on a more modern PC with a 1 Gbit card you could expect faster scanning.

The usual objection to network scanning is that "you still have to go to the scanner to put the paper in", but in a small office like ours this is simply not an issue. In our office there is no dedicated scanning PC and the ability to access the scanner from any PC is a positive benefit.

However the one inconvenience with the Ci 40's network scanning if you are using ScanWorks software is that ScanWorks requires a dongle. This means that you would either need to purchase a copy of ScanWorks for each user, or the users on the network would have to move the dongle to their PC as they required it.

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