Late last year I decided it was time to digitise my entire photo collection so far, so as to free up some valuable storage space. I also wanted to scan some slides from long ago and after a quick search on the web this scanner popped up as a good deal. It was £60, which is pretty reasonable for a scanner with so many features. I'm on a budget, so this was ideal.
Installation was very easy and as you might expect, it comes with a photo editor package, ArcSoft PhotoStudio. There is also a nice OCR program for converting images into text files, as well as the Canoscan utilities. I stuck with the minimum installation and used the scanner with Paint Shop Pro as I already had this on my pc.
By
the way, if you are using Vista, you can get the updated drivers off the Canon site, so no need to worry!
I've now scanned negative film, slides and colour prints, and I've tweaked the settings to get some superb results even from faded or scratched source materials. The ScanGear program includes a number or excellent filters like backlight correction and noise reduction. These are very useful as the processed image needs less work once you get it in your editor. For everyday scanning you probably won't use these, but it's nice to have some more advanced features for when you do need them.
Image quality when using the platen is excellent. Previews are fast and a 1200dpi (max) scan only takes about 3-4 minutes for a 6x4 photo. It's not silent, but the noise is hardly noticeable!
When scanning slides or negatives though, things are a bit hit and miss.
You can fit 4 slides into the special adaptor and they fit in quite snugly. Sometimes when you insert the adaptor back into the scan cover the slides can move, so you do have to take care. At 2400dpi it took about 22 minutes to do the job. I found anything above that to be so painfully slow and couldn't tell the difference between one resolution and the other that I didn't go above that level. I'm very pleased with the results and have had some enlargements done already - the quality is superb! If you have the time you can always go for a higher dpi if you need it.
Negatives are a bit fiddly using the 4400F, and I wouldn't actually recommend it for the job, unless you are only doing a few. The adaptor doesn't actually flatten the negatives out, so if like me you use some that have curved in storage, you will struggle to get good results. It's a shame because a better design (or a more expensive specialist scanner) would solve this problem. When negatives are sufficiently flat though, you can get some outstanding results as with slides and using the platen. Again, it's quite slow at the higher resolutions, but you probably won't need to go above 2400dpi if you're just a general user like me.
Here's a bit about the maximum resolution you can get:
Slides and Film: 9600dpi Platen: 1200dpi
There is a slight caveat here though. If you want to do a quick scan without loading up your image editor, or if you press the button on the scanner, you'll be using the CanoScan toolbox. This does save time, but unfortunately you sacrifice big time on the quality as every source is capped at only 600dpi. I can't really see why, but it's a bit of a shame!
For scan quality, I think around £60 is excellent value for money!
Now a few words about other things.
As I mentioned, there is a separate film/slide adapator unit that fits into the scanner cover. Though it's stood up well over the past few weeks, it is quite flimsy on one side and I wouldn't want to be the third or fourth member of my family to use it. The hinges are very thin and the adaptor also snaps into the cover. I wouldn't recommend this for heavy use.
There is no power indicator light, and no on/off button. Frankly, this is a big no-no for me. If you're into saving power you need to first open the cover to see if it's on, then go and pull the plug out of the socket! Why?! There are some nice big buttons on the front for emailing/copying/scanning or saving things to PDF, but no power light! Oh dear...
On the plus side, build quality is very good. The hinge for the cover is an advanced Z-lid design, which works very well for holding books down on the platen, and is very robust.
To sum up then. If you're on a budget and you need to scan film or slides, this is a great value buy. The scan quality is consistently high across the board. If you've got a lot of film and slides to do, you should probably look elsewhere!
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Jan 7th, 2008
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