Canon’s New imageFORMULA RS40 Can Scan 30 Photos Per Minute

Canon has announced the imageFORMULA RS40 photo scanner which can scan up to 40 photos per batch at a rate of 30 per minute at a maximum resolution of 600 dots per inch (DPI).

Now that the photo industry is over a decade into the digital revolution, the need to preserve older negative printed photos by scanning them for archiving and post-processing has become the standard operating procedure for photographers looking to preserve their earlier work.

Traditional flatbed scanners operate in a one photo per scan manner, so getting through large batches was tedious work. Eventually, scanner manufacturers added a page feeder for larger jobs which enabled photographers to scan multiple images at one time.

That idea is at the heart of the RS40, which not only has a sheet feeder but has oriented it vertically so that gravity does most of the work moving the photo in and out of the scanner. The imageFORMULA RS40 can manage a speed of up to 30 photos per minute, and the feeder can hold up to 40 photos or 60 documents total in a single batch.

Canon also designed it to operate without needing to download and install scanning software, as the RS40 has everything built-in. After a simple installation through a built-in utility and an accompanying video with step-by-step instructions to connect the scanner to a computer, all that’s left to do is load the RS40 with a stack of photos and hit the start button.

The scanner can also accommodate a variety of sizes as it recognizes a host of photo and document sizes, from panoramas to receipts. Canon says the conveyor design minimizes feeding errors by incorporating ultrasonic sensors that can detect overlapping pages, thereby protecting older photos and fragile documents as they move through the feeder. The scanner also has a Double Feed Release (DFR) system to restart quickly in the event of a jam.

The company also built-in an artificial intelligence (AI) function that can adjust the look of the image with tools like auto photo fix, face smoothing, face sharpening, and red-eye correction. The scanner can even compensate for paper texture, reducing the visual impact competing with the image itself, and color correction for fading due to age.

The Canon imageFORMULA RS40 scanner is available for $399.