If you have bought a multi-function printer then consider yourself lucky. Most of the multi-function printers come with scanning, printing and copier functions built inside them. But if you have separately bought a printer that only prints and a scanner that only scans then you cannot directly take a xerox copy of a paper, image or document. Thanks to free iCopy software now you can combine your printer and scanner together like a photocopier machine. The iCopy software integrates the scanning and printing in such a way that you can put a document in the scanner, press a button in iCopy software and a copy of the document comes out of your printer.
You can download iCopy from the sourceforge website. The software is available both as an installable program and as a portable application. I always prefer the portable applications as they do not leave any fingerprints behind on your Windows system. After downloading the portable iCopy software (which is less than one megabytes in size), extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a folder and run iCopy.exe from there. Before you run the iCopy software, make sure that you have powered on and attached the scanner and printer to your computer. iCopy would ask you to select a scanner. Your scanner must be WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) compatible in order to work with iCopy.
After you select the scanner and click the OK button, the main iCopy interface opens up. iCopy does not need your printer to be selected because it can be used without a printer. In the iCopy interface, you can select scanner settings (color, greyscale or text), printer settings and paper size. You can also choose a printer and adjust its settings by clicking on the Printer options button. The Image Settings button lets you choose the settings for scanning the images e.g. brightness, contrast, scaling etc. You can select the number of copies you want to take (just like in a real photocopier machine). There are three options for the output – save scanned image to folder, save as PDF file, scan multiple documents & save to file. If you do not select any of these output options, then the scanned document is sent to be printed to your default printer – making your arrangement work like a photocopier.
When you are ready, put a document in the scanner bed, set the number of copies you want to make and click on the big blue copy button. It would first scan the document into an image, save it temporarily and then sent this image to be printed on your selected printer. The whole process works seamlessly and takes only a few seconds.
The iCopy software can turn your single function scanner and printer into a multi-function photocopier machine. It supports automatic document feeder (ADF) and duplex acquisition technologies too, to make the photocopying of multiple documents much faster. It can also scan the documents and save them as JPEG images or PDF files instead of printing them. So if you are thinking of buying a multi-function printer just for using the copier function, then its time that you combine your old scanner and printer into a powerful photocopier using the iCopy software.
You can download the free iCopy software from http://icopy.sourceforge.net/.