On 2021-04-02 10:56 a.m., Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Emboldened by this, I went into the advanced options and turned on "Continuous scan", then dropped in the first part of a 300-page manual. Once the sheets were scanned, the scanner asked me whether I had more; I put in the next bundle of sheets, said yes, and away it went. All was well until partway through the last set of pages - on about page 280 the scanner halted with an error message saying it had run out of space. A sheet was half-fed, the PDF file was incomplete and therefore corrupt, and a second file was created which contained garbage left over from a previously deleted file. That's not graceful - the least it could have done was closed off the file cleanly. The 2GB thumb drive was only 3% full. (Maybe the limit is internal to the scanner.) For now I'll assume a limit of 200 pages per file, and use pdfunite to put the pieces together in the computer.
I did some more experimenting with scanning this larger manual (about 360 pages, it turns out). I re-formatted that 2GB thumb drive and tried again; this time the scanner fed the last sheet before coming up with the error message. I forget the exact wording, but it was pretty specific about the USB device being full, as opposed to some sort of internal memory overflow. (Apparently the scanner has 512MB of memory.) Again I got a corrupt PDF file, plus a second file which contained data which should have only existed on my other computers - which makes me wonder about data security. I suspect that the scanner needs a _lot_ of extra space on the USB device to build the PDF file. I tried again with a freshly-formatted 16GB stick and the entire document scanned successfully. The finished PDF file is just short of 40 megabytes. Toward the end of the scanning, the scanner was pausing more and more frequently - it seems that things don't scale too well beyond about 300 pages. Still, it's turning out to be a nice little scanner for offline use. If anyone has managed to do SFTP from a Brother scanner, let me know how you did it. I realize that this has turned into a review of the scanner, but I've gotten so far into it that I might as well see it through to the end. For now, connection to a computer is merely something it would be nice to have, rather than a necessity. The important part is that I can use it to get my work done, one way or another. -- cgi...@surfnaked.ca (Charlie Gibbs)
