Poor scan quality after Ventura update

After upgrading my Mac M1 to Ventura I have problems with the quality of scanned documents:

  1. When scanning and saving directly into a Devon group, the PDF will be compressed to much and the quality of the document is unacceptable

  2. When first scanning into the Import folder and saving separately in a second step, the pdf quality is fine

Both scenarios with exactly the same settings. The pdf in case one is less then the half of the size of pdf in case two. Bevor the Ventura upgrade case one creates the same pdf quality as case two.
Looks like a bug for me.

My environment:

  • Mac Studio M1
  • Devonthink 3.8.6
  • Scanner Fujitsu fi-7160

Whilst I hear you that the quality seems to vary depending on how you invoke the OCR process, please check the following:

  • at DEVONthink 3 > Install Add-Ons please check to see whether there is an update for ABBYY FineReader OCR (if there is an update, then you will be able to select to install ABBYY FineReader OCR even though it is already installed, and the light grey text below the entry will inform you of the available update).
  • at DEVONthink 3 > Preferences > OCR check the setting for Compress PDF - deactivate it, set it to a higher resolution, or - if as in your case using a Mac with Apple silicon - to “same as original”; note that to date that setting is not available on Intel Macs.

Re. 2.) what do you mean by an import folder (are we talking the Global Inbox, or are we talking an indexed folder?); what do you mean by “saving”?

Please can you report back here whether - especially in the poor quality file - there is a difference between the first and all other pages? There was a report recently suggesting the quality of the first page was noticeably worse than that of other pages; however, I have no information as to whether that user is using a Mac with Apple silicon or not, or which OS they are using.

  • I checked that my ABBY add-on ist up to date.
  • The OCR preferences are set to “same as original”
  • There is no difference in quality between first and second scanned page.

In the german localization of the GUI for my scenario 2 you have to choose “Neue Mappe anlegen” as the scan target. Then after clicking the “Scan” button the document is just scanned and a grey panel with a “save” button appears. After clicking the save button a pdf in good quality is created.
In my scenario 1 DEVONthink will scan and save in a single step when clicking the “Scan” button. And the quality is always quite poor.

As a new forum user I am unfortunately not allowed to attach screenshots or resulted pdfs to my post that show what I mean by the two different ways of scanning a document.

@aedwards can you help?
@BLUEFROG pls could you enable the OP to post images?

Thanks for upgrading my trust level.

This is how to scan with scenario 1 wich resulted in poor pdf quality:
ScanScenario1.pdf (301.5 KB)

Created pdf of scenario 1:
ResultTest1-1.pdf (34.2 KB)

This is scenario 2 resulted in good pdf quality:
ScanScenario2.pdf (442.7 KB)

Created pdf of scenario 2:
ResultTest2.pdf (438.5 KB)

I have a similar problem.

Using the Epson software I get a good scan.
If I scan directly into a folder in my database it get poor scan. Doen’t matter if I set OCR/compress pdf or not.
If I set the scan just to the “Import” folder it work fine.

Sorry for the delay in replying, I have been on vacation. I will take a look at this issue.

I’ve just installed the new DT version 3.8.7. Now everything is fine and the scanned PDFs on my M1 Ventura looks good again.
Thanks for the fix.

1 Like

Thanks for the validating follow-up. Much appreciated.