Canon CanoScan 5000F

I'm not going to write a long review. I have not written any reviews of any kind before. This scanner leaves me no choice. If you love some of your old prints as much as I do, and want to bring them to life again, buy this scanner. It's as simple as that. I have sat spellbound gazing at the screen after scanning in an old 35 mm negative, simply not beliveving what my eyes tell me. The quality is that good. There is dust/scratch removal as part of the scanner software, and it works miraculously well. Yes, do your best to clean the negative and scanner glass, but this software will do the final minor cleanup that can make all the difference. A review mentions the slow speed. If you want a fast scanner, look elsewhere. If for you, as for me, the only factor is the impact of the final product, I honestly can't imagine a better product than this one. The images it produces are simply stunning.

Image quality

The front buttons are easy to push inadvertently at first.

HP 750 (3-in-one product) A VERY nice, professional scanner at work, about 2 years old (its quality motivated my search for a consumer-oriented product that match its capabilities. This Canon exceeds them)

N/A

Purchased this scanner to go with the Canon i950 printer. Although the scanner is larger/longer than most is performs just great in all aspects. Some have reported that the scanner will occasionally begin to scan by itself as though it might be possessed. A querry to Canon tech Support produced a response and immediate fix. I have not experienced that or any other problem.

Text scanning is good. Photo scanning 4x6 to 8x10 while slower than others produces fantastic results. 35mm slide and or negative scanning is a little slow (start the scan and go get a coffee) once again produces fantastic results. if you think speed is essential you will undoubtedly sacrifice quality IMO.

None really

HP scanners

This is my first scanner (but I am very computer literate) and overall I like it however there are a few concerns I would have about purchasing another one. The first thing I noticed was that the plug that go into the USB and power connectors don't seem to fit very tight. This by itself is not concerning however, after using it to scan about 10 pictures, the scanner driver came up with an error code and closed. After contacting Canon (they do respond fairly quick and are helpful in their emails) they said that the error code has to do with the scanner not receiving power, and although they feel that it may have something to do with my USB2.0 drivers on the computer, I think it may have something to do with the loose cords. In problemsolving this issue, they had me plug the scanner into one of the USB1.0 connectors on the comoputer. In doing this I learned that the scanner goes much slower on a 1.0 connector, probably almost twice as slow. Other than this issue, which has not occurred lately (BTW- you could always fix the problem by exiting, and pulling out and plugging back in the connectors to the scanner), I like the picture quality that you can get from the scanner. The scanner driver has an advanced mode and a simple mode. The simple mode is pretty simple, but I prefer the advanced mode where you can adjust the histograms for the white-point, black point, red, green and blue colors. These features are nice especially when scanning old pictures that need some touching up. There is also multi mode on this scanner where you can scan multiple pictures as once, but this mode is a little cumbersome seeing as you have to put each picture about 1cm away from the edge and you can not adjust histograms for each picture (or at least I don't know how to). Lately I tried scanning some negatives which I have never done in the past. This is a bit harder. First off you can only scan the typical size negatives easily. I was trying to scan some really old negatives that were like 3in by 3in and this does not work well. When scanning the normal size negatives, the scanner goes much much slower. Again, I don't know if this is normal since I have never scanned negatives before, but it takes about 3-4 minutes to scan a picture from a negative. That is scanning the negative at a resolution to make the picture about 4x6 (about 400%). To me 3-4 minutes seems like a long time for one picture. The good news is that it has no problem scanning 3 pictures from the negatives at one time. It is much harder to adjust the histograms for the negatives, it is like you can't zoom in enough to see the effects. By the way, look around for low prices. Places like Costco offer the scanner for much lower prices, which is how I got Best Buys down from their selling price of $199. Let me know if you have any questions. rrstudio2@netscape.net. Although I am giving it only a 3 star rating, overall it is a good scanner. The 3 stars is primarily due to that error that I kept getting when first using the scanner and the fact that scanning negatives takes so long (but again, not sure if that is normal). In the scanning of pictures alone, I would give it a 4.5 in terms of quality.

-Scanned picture quality is excellent -Editting software (ArcSoft Photo Studio 5) is fairly decent. It has a pretty nice scratch and dust removal feature. One thing that almost stopped me from getting this scanner was that it didn't come with Adobe Photoshop elements. I know that photoshop is one of the better software packages although am not sure how the elements differs from this ArcSoft program. -Scanner is fairly easy to use, copying things works out well- a little slow in waiting for the scanner to warm up, etc ,but it works. -Scanning negatives is pretty easy although it should be explained better in the manual, but once you get the hang of it, it is quite easy. -You can adjust the histograms prior to a scan.

- I still don't know what that whole error code was about. I did update some chipsets in my computer, so who knows, maybe it was a computer issue and not the loose plugs issue. -Negative scanning takes a long time. I always wondered why you could have a song or sound play at the end of a scan, because the pictures scan quick enough where this is not a problem. That feature must be for scanning negatives. -Scanning multiple pictures at a time is a little cumbersome since you can't line them up at the edge of the scanner. -You can not slightly rotate the pictures with the software before scanning. -I wish the negative scanning light was wider so you could scan really old negatives.

Only other scanner I used was a commercial photoshop scanner in a college class. To me the quality of the Cansoscan 5000F is comparable to that one.