I scan a lot of documents and photos with my printer and the MF656Cdw seemed like it would be up to the task given the reviews. Unfortunately I've found myself stuck between two imperfect options: good color or good resolution. I cannot scan documents at 600 DPI from the printer touchscreen because it caps itself at 300 DPI for some mysterious reason. So to use the full 600 DPI resolution of the scanner I have to use the MF Scan Utility on a computer, this is where the real problems begin. The scans that were started using the printer touchscreen had good, accurate colors, but with MF Scan this is not the case. Scans from the flatbed are washed out with desaturated colors and overexposed shadows while scans from the document feeder are darkened and oversaturated, it's as if the actual photo would be an average of the two. This is also weird because the flatbed and document feeder produced nearly identical colors when scanned via the printer touchscreen. 300 DPI scans have the same color issues with MF Scan, so I'm thinking the resolution isn't the problem. I've tested using a Mac running Sonoma and a PC running Windows 11 with the same problematic results. So I'm stuck with three bad options:
-Scan via the printer touchscreen for poor resolution but good colors
-Scan via MF Scan for poor colors but good resolution
-Scan via the Canon mobile app or a third party app for poor resolution but good colors (I've tested this and it's the same as scanning via the printer touchscreen)
It is clear the printer can produce good scans, but the reality is that I can't get the best results using any option available to me. So, what can I do? Is there a troubleshooting step I've missed? I've tried using the ScanGear function to control the colors but ultimately different colorspace options were just a different kind of inaccurate. The printer is already color calibrated from the setup process so that isn't the problem either. (Though it's already clear the colors can be good anyway). If anyone has any tips or ideas I would greatly appreciate any help!
