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REVIEW:

Colortrac SmartLF Ci 40 large format scanner

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Paper Handling

The Colortrac SmartLF Ci 40 has a maximum scan width of 40" and a maximum media width of 42" - wide enough to accept E size, A0 size and even slightly larger documents in portrait. Because its control panel is centrally mounted on top of the lid rather than taking up space at the side, the scanner is as compact as a scanner of this size can be.

The control panel includes buttons for forward feed, rewind, scan, copy and cancel. The scan and copy buttons were not operational during our review.

Due to its single roller design, the Ci 40 is a thin media scanner, designed for scanning paper only. The maximum thickness of media it will accept is just 0.012" / 0.3mm (approximately 270 gsm), thinner than any other scanner. Despite this, we were able to feed our entire motley collection of technical drawings and maps through it. These were variously dog-eared, rolled, torn and folded and on various types of media.

We would conclude that the Ci 40's paper feed, although thin, is thick enough for all normal technical drawing scanning requirements. However, Colortrac recommend that drawings on hangers should not be fed through the Ci 40.

We found that the Ci 40 has generally reliable paper load. Because of its side justification it is easy to position and feed large, sideways curled drawings correctly.

The Ci 40 is the only scanner we have used so far that did not suffer a single jam during the entire time we had it. It is also the only scanner we have tested that was able to scan newspaper successfully in both directions without concertina'ing it. This disproves Contex's assertion that because of its grain, newspaper can only be scanned in one direction without concertina'ing.

On the negative side, we found that our pre-production review unit intensified folds in some folded documents by pinching and crushing them. In the worst case, the pinching resulted in lost image data and a distorted scanned image. Colortrac maintained that this was due to a problem with the pre-production scanner and was not a general issue. Colortrac supplied us with a production model and we are glad to say that the issues we had had with folded drawings were not repeated, try as we did to replicate them. Nevertheless, we retain a concern about the Ci 40 in this regard.

Finally, the pre-production unit we reviewed had previously been on test with a Colortrac distributor. When we received it the white drum roller was dirty and ringed with grey-black marks. This could cause a problem if you were scanning drawings on transparent media as any dirt on the roller would scan along with the drawing. The Ci 40's documentation recommends that you clean the roller with a foam cleaner. We did not have a foam cleaner and used Avery Surface Cleaner, an alcohol-based detergent. This worked a treat, quickly cleaning the roller and returning it to pristine white. We recommend that you clean the roller frequently.

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