M1212nf MFP - scanning is extremely slow

[tengler]

I have purchased M1212nf MFP machine recently. Everything works fine except the scanning. Regardless if I scan "with" or "without" HP software, the scanning is extremely slow. With setting the quality to 300 dpi in color, it's quite fine, it takes several tens of seconds to get the image to my PC. With setting to 600 dpi it takes several minutes and sometimes it doesn't finish and I have to turn the printer off and on. With setting to 1200 dpi, it takes up to 30 minutes to scan the image and in most cases it doesn't finish at all without indicating any error - it simply freezes and the printer indicates the communication is in progress.

Is this a normal behvaior of M1212nf MFP? Does it mean that I can't use higher image qualities? I have checked tha cabling and network setup and everything seams ok. I have the printer attached to ASUS wifi router so I use the LAN to print and scan. Any other data  transfers go well on the network so I assume that the network is not the problem.

I have purchased this "multifunctional" machine to replace my old printer and scanner with a single device. But so far the scanner is unsuable for me because of its extremely low performance :(.

Any ideas? Any hints? Thank you in advance for any help.

[Shane_R · Accepted solution]

What OS are you using?

What firewall and antivirus software do you use?

HP designed a quick and easy tool that diagnoses and resolves many printing, scanning, and connectivity problems: The HP Print and Scan Doctor. HP recommends that you download and install the Print and Scan Doctor any time you need to troubleshoot a problem with your HP printer from the link below.

Let me know what errors you receive?

http://www.hp.com/go/tools

[tengler]

Hello,

I'm using Windows XP Home SP3, Avast Antivirus and Comodo Firewall.

I have run the disgnostic tool but it reported everything was OK, no errors were found. I have also perfomed a scanning test executed directly from the tool using  higher resolution and it finished in a reasonable time. It went me to a suspicion that the core of the problem could be the software I use as a client for the scanning - Zoner Photo Studio. I can see that there is high network activity at the beginning of  scanning job, which finishes quite soon, but then there are several minutes when the Zoner Photo Studio indicates that something is in progress and the printer LED is blinking indicating some activity as well but there is no network traffic at all.

When tried to scan using the simplest way - I just ran the "Scan to" command from the Windows Start menu, the job finished right after the network activity stopped.

I will spend more time with investigating what's going and will try various combinations of scanning procedures to find the real  "bottleneck". I will then come back with my findings. Maybe the problem is not in the printer/scanner at all.

So far, thanks a lot for your help.

Martin

[Shane_R]

Since the only program you seem to have slow scanning through is the Zoner Photo Studio, I'm betting there is some hold up in how the program uses the TWAIN drivers needed for scanning.  There are a couple things to try to speed up scanning.  First uninstall the printer, and reinstall it using a driver download.  This will ensure that you have the latest version of all the HP software installed.  If that doesn't help, contact the manufacturer of Zoner to see if they have any updates that may resolve the problem.  Let me know what you find.

HP LaserJet Full Feature Software and Driver

[tengler]

Hello Shane_R,

I did some investigation and perfomed a series of tests with different settings and I probably found the root of the problem. It was in using WIA drivers instead TWAIN drivers. Because the WIA driver looks  more user friendly than the TWAIN driver (from my personal perspective), I decided to use the WIA drivers recently. The problem is that in the beginning I was scanning paper documents at low resolution, where I didn't notice any significant performance issue. Later on I started to scan some photographs and swithched to high resolution. And here is the problem. With WIA driver the scanning becomes multiply slower than with TWAIN driver.

For example, the measurings for 600 dpi showed that with both methods it took about 12 seconds on my computer to initiate (from clicking the scan button to the moment the computer started receiving data). Than it always took exactly 60 seconds to scan the whole A4 page at 600 dpi and transfer it to my computer. But after the data transfer finished over the network then the further processing differed significantly for both methods. With TWAIN driver it took from 4 to 5 minutes to do "something" and then the scanned image appeared in the Zoner software ready for processing. With the TWAIN driver it always took few seconds. In total, scanning full A4 page on my computer takes about 80 seconds with TWAIN driver and 5:30 to  6:00 minutes with WIA drivers. With 300 dpi the difference in total time is not so obvious at the first look but with 1200 dpi it's extreme - 5 minutes with TWAIN vs. 37 minutes with WIA!

So, for now scanning photos at 600 dpi and having the full page in 80 seconds in my computer is somehow acceptable for me.

Anyway, I would have an additional question. During the tests, I noticed the transfer speed between the printer/scanner and the computer was quite stable and kept sustained about 1,9 MB/s. My question is if it is the maximum transfer rate the scanner is able to perform or if there may be some network limitations at my side and I could even be able to increase the scanning performance. I use ASUS 500g wireless router, however both printer and PC are connected by  wires. When transferring data between various computers in the same network, I can get significantly higher transfer rates so I wonder if the scanner could perform even faster.

[Shane_R]

For scanning 1.9 MB/s is about as fast as you're going to get. That's actually around the top end speed for network scanning for now. Later on that top end will go up, but it will be a few more years before that happens. Glad you figured out what was causing the problem. 🙂

[tengler]

Thank you, Share_R, very much for the link to the diagnostic tools, which showed that the problem is not in the printer/scanner or network. Also thank you for pointing me to focus on the Zoner Photo Studio software, which led me to the real cause of the poroblem.

[Shane_R]

No problem. 🙂

[KelseySF]

We are having a problem with our M1212nf MFP scanner being very slow as well. It takes over 2 minutes to scan to preview and another 2:30 minutes to create the document. I tried unplugging the printer/scanner for 15 seconds like the troubleshooting area of the website suggested but it has not improved.

I also tried top download the HP Print and Scan Doctor, and then the Full Software driver that it required. I could never get it to go through with a diagnostic.

[Shane_R]

What OS are you using?

What DPI are you scanning to?