This is only my third scanner I've owned and first scanner to be good enough to scan printed photos and negative film. I have spent the last week scanning about 1800 photos and negative film. In short, this scanner is very good for archiving old photos. This scanner is so much quicker than my old Canoscan LIDE 20 even on some of the 9000F's highest settings. The preview is also very fast.
Printed photos:
The lid is pretty strong and can keep down the most rolled up photos. Most of the photos I scanned came out pretty good. I think that since my monitor and scanner is not calibrated, some of the colors seemed just a bit off after the fade correction. I generally use the fade correction on black and white photos while on color, I would manually adjust it. There is also this blue tint problem when using the scanner driver with Google's Picasa. However, using the MP Navigator EX with the scanner driver is about the same as using Picasa and have resorted to this.
The thumbnail view feature on the scanner driver works well. It does take some playing around with where the photos are on the scanner to get it to recognize each individual picture sometimes. Once you get used to it, its not an issue. It can scan up to 12 different images (and put them in individual files) at one time. There was some rare instances i needed more than 12, but rarely so 12 should be enough for most scans.
Scanning negatives:
I have scanned some color and b/w films and it seems to work well. The instructions calls for having the film emulsion side up (what they really say is photo facing up), versus the established practice of keeping it down ("dull" side down facing the scanner). Doing this without any tweaks to the software yields pictures that are flipped (does not matter if you flip horizontal or vertical). You will have to manually flip it when you get back into MP Navigator before saving, or flipping the image in Scangear before you scan. Either way its not difficult or time consuming. It is a pain when you forget before saving since now some of your scanned film is backwards.
You should always check the preview to see if the software missed or mis-cropped any of the negative film. Sometimes this can happen if the photo negative is too dark or too light. It has happened on occasion so i always check the preview.
The 35mm negative holder works pretty well. With some film, the holder can get caught on the film, preventing it from closing properly. Sometimes it takes some adjustment but not too difficult once you notice what the problem is. It can scan two strips of 6 negatives, or 12 negatives in total. I usually use 2400dpi and it takes the scanner 12 minutes to scan 12 negatives. 3200dpi takes 20 minutes. For many pictures, 2400dpi can yield an 8x10 printed photo at good quality. Check the output resolution and needed resolution for prints to verify.
MP Navigator EX:
I always use the scanner driver so i can adjust the settings as i go along, depending on the pictures/negatives. Then later on, you can save them to another directory and rename the starting letters, and numbering the photos in order. If you use the same default starting letters (IMG), it will number after the last photo you saved. If there is already an IMG_0012, it will name the next set IMG_0013 and so forth. This is very handy if you dont want to change the name and keep saving them in batches.
The software scans and stores the data in BMP files in another directory. This directory can get large quite fast since many of my scans were above 50mb, so after 30 files, it is about 1.5GB. It stores it after each scan. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, the files are still there in the BMP format. Even if you start up the software again to scan, it will number the BMP after the existing ones so the old ones are never over-written. This can happen if the ScanGear app is minimized. When you do this, i have not seen a way to restore this window. I have used Photoshop to automate saving the BMPs as standard quality JPGs.
Computer Hardware.
My computer has an AMD BE-2350 with only 2GB ram on windows XP. It seems to scan everything fine using the newest version of MP Navigator EX (3.14) with the newest scanner driver. I have kept the BMP image size below 100MB, or about 5-10mb in JPG format with "standard" compression. Some have complained that having not enough ram will not work with this scanner, but with the latest software and drivers, having only 2gb seems to work on my computer.
| Brand | Canon |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 48.01 x 27.18 x 11.18 cm; 4.58 kg |
| Item model number | 4207B002 |
| Manufacturer | Canon |
| Series | CanoScan 9000F |
| Computer Memory Type | DRAM |
| Wattage | 15 watts |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Item Weight | 4.58 kg |
| Guaranteed software updates until | unknown |
