Canon printer mp490

[Margaret N]

I finally purchased the Canon Printer mentioned a middle of the road price for me. I am not certain that it is the right one for me but at least I can understand it to a point.

I tried last night to scan a Text document on to my PC, not easy. First it wanted to open and save in my Pictures folder their is no other option in the drop down list. In the end I somehow went round the houses and saved it in PDF in Pictures. I then opened it and copied it but the only option again was to note pad. I then opened note pad and copied it into Word. Not only was this hard work the OCR part left the document a little scrambled it did not reconize the letters 'a' and 'r'.

Does anyone know if I will get updates from Canon as I cannot see an option to request them. I have not registered it as I do not agree to Canon retriving information about how much I use it. (that part is a long story).

[Margaret N]

UPDATE I think that I have made a little progress. I used Navigator, Save to File - even though I selected Documents it came up as an image in photographs. I was able to open my Text Document with Picture Manager and copy and paste into Word. Still a long way round but an improvement.

[col48]

Have you had a scanner before? Optical Character Recognition (OCR) never seems to be very satisfactory. The software (which most likely comes with the hardware in some way) should offer a choice between Text (Document) and Image (Photo or Picture). It will probably scan as a picture and display the image in a viewing window at which point you may have to exercise the choice, but it might want the choice up front.

If what you want is purely text, then the quality may be improved by covering up any part of the page which is non-textual, and (if it is a flat-bed scanner) making sure the page is lined up and firmly placed on on the scan bed. Always proof-read the text - things like I or 1 instead of l can be easily missed. And " can come out as '' (that is a double quote as against two single quotes)

Moan: I think you should be able to tell the OCR to assume the text is in a particular font - surely that would improve its chances of getting it right? Or even "train" it if the text is a long one so that if it is consistently getting I and l wrong, for instance, it can learn to do better. I'd like to be able to try different OCR software on an image already scanned in to see which does best. Humph!

[Margaret N]

Hello Col48,

The problem is that this printer does not appear to have an OCR programme. I have used PC's and scanners since about 1987 and it never ocurred to me that it would not have an OCR. I was so fed up with first an Epsom Printer years ago that cost a fortune and the ink was £77.00then an HP that was a problem from day one but it did have a lot of facilities.
I like this Canon 490/492 for every day printing and I do very little it has some interesting options if you dig deep but according to Canon it is only intended to scan and save as a PDF file in Pictures but this is what happened to my english text just now the whole A4 page came out like this lelf,ueug aql up{llm premroJ pauref, oq louueJ. The printer is definately set in english. It does have a few interesting templates for creating calendars or business cards. When you purchase these items they do not specify the fine detail. I now see that the one I really liked and cost £112 is now on sale for £59.00

Thank you for your interest.

[Cloggie]

Hi Margaret,
Looking at the specifications for your printer/scanner, it indeed appears that it does not include any separate OCR software:

See: http://www.canon.co.uk/for_home/prod...x.aspx?specs=1
Software Included: Canon MP Navigator EX, Canon Easy-PhotoPrint EX, Canon Easy-WebPrint EX*,
*Canon Easy-WebPrint EX available as download from www.canon-europe.com, Internet Explorer 7 or later is required

However, this functionality is included in the MP Navigator EX program.
For example, http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/print...on-pixma-mp490 says "As well as the driver, Canon provides the MP Navigator EX and Easy-PhotoPrint EX utilities, which cover most basic print, scan and copy needs, including OCR."

Have you installed the User Guide that came with your printer/scanner? This would normally be found on the CD that came with it. Alternatively you can download it from the Canon site.
The latest software, drivers and user manuals can be downloaded here: http://www.canon.co.uk/Support/Consu...r_manuals.aspx

You can also download the MP490 series On-screen Manual here: http://canoncanada.custhelp.com/app/...ail/a_id/14983
(this may or may not be the same as the user guide; I haven't checked)
I downloaded this On-screen Manual to see what it says, and sure enough, it contains a section on OCR.
The relevant section in the On-screen Manual is: Advanced Guide > Scanning > Scanning with the Bundled Application Software > MP Navigator EX Screens > OCR Dialog Box

The page starts with
OCR Dialog Box
Click OCR on the Custom Scan with One-click tab or in the One-click Mode screen to open the OCR dialog box" and goes on to talk about Scan Settings, Save Settings and Application Settings.

This Note may also be of use to you:
Note
Only text written in languages that can be selected on the General tab can be extracted to Notepad (included with Windows). Click Set... on the General tab and specify the language according to the language of the document to be scanned.
When scanning multiple documents, you can collect the extracted text into one file.
General Tab
Text displayed in Notepad (included with Windows) is for guidance only. Text in the image of the following types of documents may not be detected correctly.
- Documents containing text with font size outside the range of 8 points to 40 points (at 300 dpi)
- Slanted documents
- Documents placed upside down or documents with text in the wrong orientation (rotated characters)
- Documents containing special fonts, effects, italics, or hand-written text
- Documents with narrow line spacing
- Documents with colors in the background of text
- Documents containing multiple languages

It sounds like the program extracts text to Notepad, from which you could copy & paste it to Word. I'm not sure whether you can extract directly to Word. But I would highly recommend reading through the OCR section in the Manual and learning how to adjust the various settings to see if you can achieve the desired result. But as col48 says, OCR results are not always as good as we would like them to be, depending on the quality of the text to be scanned, the scanning settings (resolution) used, and the OCR program itself. If you are going to be using OCR a lot, you may wish to invest in a better OCR program.

You should also be able to save scans as PDF, which is another document format (rather than image). This is useful for printing and sharing purposes, but not for text editing purposes.

[Margaret N]

Hello Sarah,

I have been having a further play with this programme tonight and used the OCR again and most of it came out ok excepte the last few lines and I am not sure what they could been saying. I tried to save to notepad but have not yet found it so will look again later. It did however turn up in a Navigator folder and when opened as text was present in Windows Photo Gallery as a TIFF. Last evening I did manage one in PDF format and was able to copy and paste but this was all gobbly/gook. I will read all the links that you have sent me and report back in due course. At the end of the day you only get what you pay for and I did not pay too much for this. By the way I have installed everything possible from the CD and it says on the box it is for XP/Vista but the CD is labelled Canon492 Vista/Windows 7.
Thank you so much for your help.