O
Olin K. McDaniel
Over the past ten or more years I've owned several flatbed scanners.
And have had an opportunity to evaluate several others owned by local
friends. The earliest I tried were only really useful for scanning
black and white text or the equivalent. Scans of B & W photo prints
were not really very attractive. As time passed and the quality of
scanners improved, I eventually had one that claimed to be able to
scan 35 mm color slides, but it failed miserably. It was about this
point that I developed my own technique for photographing the slides
with Nikon 2 or 3 MB digital cameras, using their excellent macro
ability. Then I bought an HP 4400C flatbed scanner, thinking it would
work with slides and larger B&W negatives. It too failed miserably,
so I stayed with the camera copying, since it did work to a reasonable
degree. Don't get me wrong, this scanner has done a great job on
scanning opaque items, just no good on slides nor negatives.
Just recently I found several hundred old B&W negatives (9 by 12 cm)
I took while I was overseas during WW II, and wanted to recover those
images. I again tried the HP 4400C and had the same lousy results.
So, again back to using the camera trick, and got what satisfied me as
excellent images, which I then processed and inverted to positives in
Photo Shop.
One of my local friends told me he had just bought a Canon 8600F
flatbed scanner and invited me to try it on my old negatives. In
spite of my doubts, I accepted and let it scan several of them in the
default settings of the software that came with it. We had to accept
the limitation that the largest template that came with it cut off a
small part of my negatives, because it was made to accept only 3
inches width (less than the 9 cm .) But I was amazed at the quality
of the resulting scans - they were VASTLY more detailed and better
resolution than the images I had just obtained with the camera method.
Furthermore, the default settings of the Canon software seemed to
eliminate almost all need to post process in Photo Shop.
So - here is why I'm posting this. In all the posts I've read on here
over the past year or so, virtually no mention has ever been made of a
Canon flatbed scanner. It's always been either HP or Epson or
MicroTek or other. I'd like to know why this might be? What am I
possibly missing? Incidentally this unit sells for about $170. Are
the other brands of similar price any better? Thanks for inputs.
Olin McDaniel
And have had an opportunity to evaluate several others owned by local
friends. The earliest I tried were only really useful for scanning
black and white text or the equivalent. Scans of B & W photo prints
were not really very attractive. As time passed and the quality of
scanners improved, I eventually had one that claimed to be able to
scan 35 mm color slides, but it failed miserably. It was about this
point that I developed my own technique for photographing the slides
with Nikon 2 or 3 MB digital cameras, using their excellent macro
ability. Then I bought an HP 4400C flatbed scanner, thinking it would
work with slides and larger B&W negatives. It too failed miserably,
so I stayed with the camera copying, since it did work to a reasonable
degree. Don't get me wrong, this scanner has done a great job on
scanning opaque items, just no good on slides nor negatives.
Just recently I found several hundred old B&W negatives (9 by 12 cm)
I took while I was overseas during WW II, and wanted to recover those
images. I again tried the HP 4400C and had the same lousy results.
So, again back to using the camera trick, and got what satisfied me as
excellent images, which I then processed and inverted to positives in
Photo Shop.
One of my local friends told me he had just bought a Canon 8600F
flatbed scanner and invited me to try it on my old negatives. In
spite of my doubts, I accepted and let it scan several of them in the
default settings of the software that came with it. We had to accept
the limitation that the largest template that came with it cut off a
small part of my negatives, because it was made to accept only 3
inches width (less than the 9 cm .) But I was amazed at the quality
of the resulting scans - they were VASTLY more detailed and better
resolution than the images I had just obtained with the camera method.
Furthermore, the default settings of the Canon software seemed to
eliminate almost all need to post process in Photo Shop.
So - here is why I'm posting this. In all the posts I've read on here
over the past year or so, virtually no mention has ever been made of a
Canon flatbed scanner. It's always been either HP or Epson or
MicroTek or other. I'd like to know why this might be? What am I
possibly missing? Incidentally this unit sells for about $170. Are
the other brands of similar price any better? Thanks for inputs.
Olin McDaniel