Scanning issues with Brother DCP-7045N and Image Capture plugin

DEVONthink
1

Is anyone using DT 3.0 with a scanner in the Brother DCP series? I’m having some trouble getting my DCP-7045N ready for macOS 10.15. Scanning from within DT3 often produces garbled scans, whereas the Image Capture app works OK as far as I can see.

In more detail: Everything works fine with the ancient Brother software (ControlCenter 2.17.10), but this is 32-bit and so won’t run under Catalina. From Brother’s rather confusing “Catalina Support Statement” it seems they won’t be updating ControlCenter, and I think my scanner is too old to work with Brother’s newer iPrint&Scan software.

This leaves me with the option of using the Image Capture scanner driver, which Brother says they will update for Catalina. Used within the Image Capture app itself the current version of the driver seems OK, but scanning directly from DT3 I get mixed results. Sometimes it works, but often I get a garbled scan: there are marks on the page, but not in the right places. In addition, sometimes the scanner interface in DT3 becomes unresponsive and I have to use the “gear” button to disconnect and then re-connect.

I have tried to troubleshoot with different scan types (flatbed/document feeder, colour/mono, resolution, destination) but have not been able to discover if certain combinations work better than others. The fact that the scan settings don’t stick makes the job a bit harder.

Of course, everything might start to work properly with the forthcoming Catalina version of the scanner driver. But I’d prefer to get it sorted before I upgrade. The DCP-7045N has done me well for many years and I’d rather not cough up for a new scanner if I don’t have to.

Anyone else seeing problems?

2

We don’t have that model of scanner to test against here, however the drivers for some models of scanners sometimes report unexpected values.

Could you open a support ticket and send a copy of the console.log file and we will investigate. To do this:

  • In Finder select the menu Go->Go to Folder…, copy and paste the line below and press Go.
    ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink 3
  • There should be a file called console.log in this folder, if you attach this to the support ticket that would be great.
3

Thanks Alan. I had more or less written a ticket, complete with console logs and crash logs, when I thought to check back with Brother. They’ve now released an updated driver for macOS 10.15, and at first glance this has improved the situation (note that I’m still on Mojave, so I can’t speak for Catalina). At least the original problem of garbled PDFs when scanning from the document feeder seems to be fixed. If I have any more trouble I’ll file a ticket and add a note here.

4

Thats great, thanks for letting me know.

5

On further testing, the new Brother driver seems to be basically OK. Compared to scanning with Image Capture, direct scans into DT have some small differences in the crop and especially the file size: even after OCR in DT, the direct scanning route seems to yield larger files.

I think there’s scope for a wider discussion of how to get the best scan results in DT3 (with DTP 2, didn’t we have more control over the resolution of the output PDF?) But my original problem has been solved.

PS thanks for the speed and accuracy of the DT3 scanning engine. I find it awesome.