I replaced my old Canon Pixma MP830 with a Lexmark Platinum Pro905 printer (one of those multi-function devices). My primary goal was for it to help me successfully scan sheet music from old guitar magazines I’ve been keeping around since I was a teenager (I have hundreds of them–yes, it’s been a while since my teens). The old Canon did a great job at everything except for the fact that the automatic document feeder (ADF) jammed up and slipped every few pages when scanning the magazines. Note that the type of paper I’m scanning is much lighter than typical magazine paper; it’s really thin, almost newspaper-like. Of course, in addition to that goal, I wanted it to be a good general purpose printer, fax, scanner, and copier.

I was really impressed by the installation experience (both software and hardware). I didn’t necessarily need all the details it provided but it was good enough to make me notice the attention to detail that went into it; kudos to the dev team. I’m sure that even the hardcore newbies would get through it all most of the time if they read and follow the steps. It automatically found a new version of the installer online, downloaded, and installed it. Showed brief videos demonstrating step-by-step how to install the ink cartridges, etc. Finally, when it asked me to connect the printer to the computer via its USB cable it updated the firmware automatically. Pretty seamless.

Once it was up and running, the first thing I tried was to scan a few pages of sheet music from the magazines I mentioned earlier. The ADF worked really, really well. No jams or slips. However, and this does kind of put a damper on things, I can’t get it to scan both sides of the sheets that are fed through. My old Canon supported this which made it’s ADF scans to PDFs feature really useful. The Lexmark’s scan via ADF to PDF support seems kind of useless unless you’re scanning one-sided pages. Instead, I’m having to resort to using the ADF but creating a JPEG per page. This requires feeding the stack of pages in twice (one for each side) and then sorting the JPEG files once they’ve been scanned. It’s unfortunately going to still be a painful and time-consuming task to scan all the magazines.

Lastly, I printed off some color photos on 4×6 glossy photo paper. The quality looks great actually and there’s nothing for me to complain about on that front.

All in all, it’s pretty nice and probably a worthwhile upgrade for us but not perfect. I’m hoping I’m just missing some hard-to-find, tucked away setting for two-sided scanning via the automatic document feeder but I’m pretty sure I looked everywhere. Oh well…