I am 27. Grew up in England. Went to school in France. Ride BMX, run 3 cars, enjoy history & video g...
I am 27. Grew up in England. Went to school in France. Ride BMX, run 3 cars, enjoy history & video games. Collect toys and rant and rave at everything which I don't like! Free & single.
Member since:19.01.2005
Reviews:21
Scanners! I have had a few in the past and the Canon 4200F is my latest purchase. I am a fanatic when it comes to filing and everything needs to be saved and filed correctly. My hobby as a WW2 aircraft researcher makes me this way and the amount of documents I get all need to be filed.
Out of a choice of three at the local shop this wonderful 'black beast' was cheaper and offered more for you money. Canon of course is a renowned company and photography is their job after all. As a scanner it does what it says on the box. You can then save your document scan either as a Jpeg or as a .PDF which is an added bonus. However, what really sets it apart from the others was the 35mm negative film scanner included. This was the icing on the cake! I have hundreds of 35 mm film negatives and with this scanner I was able to 'upload' them 4 at a time onto the PC. In the past I had an Epson film scanner which ran on SCSI and was very slow and quite often didn't work (That was in the days of Windows 95). Thus allowing you to either print out, email and / or modify your old photos. Excellent!
The 4200F scanner does still take up a fair amount of free desk space (not disk), so make sure you have room for it. I often find that people who have scanners don't really make full use of them because of the space it needs. I make sure that mine is always plugged in. Yes another plug and yes another USB 2.0 port.
The installation was very easy to follow the instructions clear and precise. Make sure you do follow them correctly! The drivers were installed with no bugs or errors. A very easy to usetool bar comes with the scanner and fits on the XP desktop as a single icon and with either a double click of the mouse or at a touch of a button on the 4200F it bursts into life. There is still a short warming up time but once ready a scan can be done very quickly. I also use it a home photocopier. Saves going to the Post-Office only to find that the photocopier is out of order. (Support you PO by sending letters and buying stamps). It's quiet and has never let me down. The quality is fantastic and depending what you are scanning the 4200F crops the image to the correct size. I recall the first scanner I had, I scanned a photo 10x15 and it scanned it A4 paper size. No need to worry about that happening.
It is important to note that I use Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photo-shop as my main scanner software. I have not tried it with any other. Adobe is by far the best software I have used, not only at home but also at work. The scans are saved in a TEMP folder in My Documents and open in Adobe. With Windows Xp and the "Printer Wizard", you can print the scan out instantly if required. Its all down to trail and error at this point.
The toolbar, I found does not always save the settings so you have to manually tell it to open the scanned image with your programme of choice (Adobe in my case). This I presume is my own fault for not taking the time to check the options tab.
With that said the Canon 4200F is a great device, works well and does a quick clean job.
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Nice review, good one. I'm a disorganised person by nature, but the idea of a film scanner is massively appealing with some of the stuff I've got cluttering up the garage!
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