Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 262
 Great scanner for images, slides or negatives! December 27, 2006
D. Burton (Kentucky, United States)
41 out of 41 found this review helpful
I just got this scanner about 10 days before Christmas. I've been very pleased - it exceeds all my expectations.
I got it for two reasons: (1) my old scanner does not work with Windows XP, and (2) I've been wanting a good scanner for slides and negatives for many years, but decided to wait until technology and price improved. Well, it was worth the wait! I've already scanned several dozen color slides as well as several negatives and other images. The quality of the slide and negative scanning was excellent! And the speed is great compared to my old scanner. I've not tried all the bells and whistles yet, but everything I've tried so far works very well. Using the slide holder is a little tedious, but for the price I am extremely pleased.
I did considerable research before buying this scanner, and quickly learned that Canon is definitely the way to go for quality film/slide scanners. I first planned to order a Canoscan model that I later found out was discontinued, but this one is a newer model and seems to be as good or better, from what I can tell thus far.
I'll supplement this review if necessary once I've used the scanner some more.
Wow! I'm scanning slides from the 1940s w/in 10 min of setup!!! January 3, 2008
J. Muench (NY United States)
35 out of 35 found this review helpful
I have been toting around a shoebox of my dad's slides since he passed away. There are about 500 Kodachrome transparencies of family vacations, army photos, and all us kids at Easter and Christmas. Even without cleaning the slides, I am completely amazed at how good these are coming out! I was only able to see these in one of those little slide boxes you held up to the light--until today. I'm finding great early photos of my mom from the 40s wearing a fantastic print dress and big curls in her hair! So far I'm extremely pleased with how these are coming out!!!
The scanner is VERY easy to set up. I have an iMac running Leopard. I followed the quick-start guide, popped in the cd, clicky click click, plug it in, did a quick test with a cartoon, and worked like a charm. I mainly purchased it for scanning this bunch of old slides. It comes with a little plastic tray (for lack of a better term) to put 4 slides in. This tray is conveniently hidden behind a white plastic sheet in the lid of the scanner. This tray feels kinda flimsy, so I'm being very careful with it--that is my only concern so far.
With the $99 price, there is no great software for correcting the dust and fuzz. You can however, play a little bit with the image settings. For most of what I have scanned so far, I have only set the Backlight Correction setting to Low or Medium; and you can do this on a slide by slide basis or do them all on one setting. This has made some of the older dark photos look fantastic. I have also used the Rotate to turn the photo right way up or flip it over.
I'm really impressed with the quality and ease-of-use so far. My intention was just to get these into a digital format before they turn to dust, not do magic with them just yet. Like the Technicolor Ektachrome slides are red-red, and I'd like to eventually fix the worthwhile ones of those, as well as do the repair and hair removal needed on a bunch. Overall first impression is this is a great value, and the quality is better than expected overall. If you need to do a LOT of correcting of your slides/film/photos, you may want to jump up a few levels to one with a more advanced Photo-shop-like software to do this all at once.
Update 1/27/08--
I was in such a hurry to get slides digitized when I started using this scanner... Just wanted to pass on what I learned so far. I'm pretty impressed with the software that does come with it. At first pass it didn't seem all that impressive and I thought I was lucky that the slides scanned looked as good as they did! After taking more time--and slowing down to see what some of the other options really did in the panel after you have 'previewed' a batch--omg it does wonders!!! The Ektachromes that are way red, well now they look much more normal. I have gone back and rescanned a bunch of slides from the beginning mad rush I was in, and I have to tell you that they look even more incredible than before. A pretty good scan of a slide of my Mom dated May 1946 is brighter, skin color more natural... I'm very pleased with how this product is working, can you tell?!
Another crumb of advice, get a good quality photo brush to get the dust and crumbs off the slides--I'm surprised how much can get removed with the soft natural bristles. I also got a photographic emulsion cleaner and pads for some of the tough spots. Whatever is in that bottle has removed quite a few of those black spots that always show up on someone's forehead!
And I see the price dropped on this... I paid $99 and thought it was a good deal! Good luck!
 Decent scanner, but Canon left out an important product spec! November 12, 2007
S. Little
34 out of 36 found this review helpful
BEWARE: Unfortunately Canon left out an important detail in the product specifications (and now I'm stuck with a scanner that does 1/4 of what it says it can do on the box).
Whatever is listed as the highest DPI in the listbox is THE highest the scanner will optically scan. For regular scans, it is LIMITED to 1200DPI. You can type in a higher number, but it simply scans it at 1200DPI then scales it up to the DPI you typed in (software interpolation is worthless, it just makes the image large and fuzzy). So if you are expecting this to scan normal documents at 4800x9600DPI (at this DPI, just a logo or something small) FORGET IT! Canon put a limitation in the scanner driver to prevent it from scanning higher than 1200DPI on normal scans.
*** It ONLY scans at 4800x9600DPI when doing film/slides (which isn't what I bought this scanner for). ***
I thought I was buying a Porsche and got a VW instead, sure it still gets me there, but it's not the same...
 Great value, typical mediocre software from Japanese co. February 18, 2007
Jo Gusto (Santa Cruz, CA USA)
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
I bought this scanner to replace my ageing Microtek Scanmaker E6 flatbed color scanner. The Microtek unit worked just fine after many years (6? 8? I can't remember!) but it was slow, required a big, clunky SCSI cable and adapter, and the software (TWAIN Drivers) was quite dated and still buggy. I knew they'd never update the drivers again, so I decided to get this Canon as a replacement.
I've been using it for about 2 months now, just for scanning documents, and a few photos. The scan performance seems fine. It's definitely faster than the older scanner, and it did plug and play just fine.
The software? UGH. Why do the Japanese seem to have a problem producing good-quality, functional, well-designed intuitive software? This isn't rocket science. It's just a driver, folks. The thing is riddled with stupid little annoyances that really detract from the otherwise pleasant experience. For example, each time you scan a page, it forgets the settings you just used, and starts again from the same set of defaults. You can save settings by name, but each time the driver starts up, you must reselect the group of settings you want. If you're scanning 10 pages, this gets old fast.
The integration of the front panel buttons with the bundled software is equally quirky and annoying. And, some of the applications that would normally be quite useful, aren't, simply because they failed to actually ask any REAL WORLD USERS for feedback on their stupid user interface designs!
All in all, a worthwhile purchase. Expect to be annoyed by the software, but you will find it useable. Canon, if you are listening, try beta testing your designs before shipping your product. A little bit of tweaking will go a long way towards making a better product. I'm sure that's how Apple does it.
 Built for idiots January 26, 2007
Dan Pittenger (death valley, ca)
23 out of 34 found this review helpful
Wayyy disappointing from the folks at Canon. The interface is made for morons...if you want configureable options, look elsewhere. Slow as all hell...think 5+ minutes for a "high quality" scan which is only roughly 220kb. I wanted a scanner, I bought a toy. If you are serious about scanning 35mm negitives or slides, this model isn't for you.
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