New Canon 8400F

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jiml

After a year of looking, I finally decided on the Canon 8400F flatbed
with slide equipped lid.

I've scanned about 40 slides with the provided software and several
photos.

It came with Presto Pagemanager which I was used to from my UMAX S-12
scanner days, Photoshop Elements, which I plan on making my number one
image tool, and ArcSoft Studio 5.5. I installed its OCR program which
I will never use. In addition, the Canonscan toolbox and drivers
that make the scanner available for all the other image programs out
there that want to 'acquire' or import an image from a scanner. I
can't imagine anything not working with this Canon software.

Good Bye and Good Riddance to the SCSII interface. USB 2.0 is so
user friendly and they shipped a nice long shielded USB cable, too.

Slides scanned at 3600 are too slow. I dropped back to 1600 and am
very happy with that resolution. I quickly decided on the multiscan
feature. I load four slides at once and tell it to multiscan. It
does the scanning and the four slide images appear for review a
minute or two later in one of my image editing program. My job is to
'fix' and name and save the images. That normally takes less than a
minute each.

You can turn on or off, the dust and scratch removal features of the
scanner software and it is also available for 'after' scan in a couple
of the editing programs. I leave it off as I don't really mind dust
and scratches on 40 year old photographs. When I start selling images
then I'll worry about dust and scratches.

Not bad for $140 from amazon.com

DKid
 
jiml said:
After a year of looking, I finally decided on the Canon 8400F flatbed
with slide equipped lid.

I've scanned about 40 slides with the provided software and several
photos.

It came with Presto Pagemanager which I was used to from my UMAX S-12
scanner days, Photoshop Elements, which I plan on making my number one
image tool, and ArcSoft Studio 5.5. I installed its OCR program which
I will never use. In addition, the Canonscan toolbox and drivers
that make the scanner available for all the other image programs out
there that want to 'acquire' or import an image from a scanner. I
can't imagine anything not working with this Canon software.

Good Bye and Good Riddance to the SCSII interface. USB 2.0 is so
user friendly and they shipped a nice long shielded USB cable, too.

Slides scanned at 3600 are too slow. I dropped back to 1600 and am
very happy with that resolution. I quickly decided on the multiscan
feature. I load four slides at once and tell it to multiscan. It
does the scanning and the four slide images appear for review a
minute or two later in one of my image editing program. My job is to
'fix' and name and save the images. That normally takes less than a
minute each.

You can turn on or off, the dust and scratch removal features of the
scanner software and it is also available for 'after' scan in a couple
of the editing programs. I leave it off as I don't really mind dust
and scratches on 40 year old photographs. When I start selling images
then I'll worry about dust and scratches.

Not bad for $140 from amazon.com

DKid
Click to expand...

Yes, I like mine also, One point, if you scanned at 3600 dpi, you were
interpolating because the maximum optical resolution for the CanoScan 8400F
is 3200 dpi.

In Advanced Mode:
One thing I found about the 120 film negative scanning, if the negative has
a lot of black in the image, the Thumbnails view mode does not get the frame
size correct.

Turn off the thumbnails view and you can manually set the cropping box.
 
Yes, I like mine also, One point, if you scanned at 3600 dpi, you were
interpolating because the maximum optical resolution for the CanoScan 8400F
is 3200 dpi.

In Advanced Mode:
One thing I found about the 120 film negative scanning, if the negative has
a lot of black in the image, the Thumbnails view mode does not get the frame
size correct.

Turn off the thumbnails view and you can manually set the cropping box.
Click to expand...

My only disappointment is that the poorly developed near black
slides will not come out. That's when I turned up the pixels to max
(3200 probably) and set for lighter scans and then brightened up on
the software. Still, nothing I scanned gave me the detail that I
could get by holding up the slide to a bright lightbulb. Go figure.

DK
 
jiml said:
My only disappointment is that the poorly developed near black
slides will not come out. That's when I turned up the pixels to max
(3200 probably) and set for lighter scans and then brightened up on
the software. Still, nothing I scanned gave me the detail that I
could get by holding up the slide to a bright lightbulb. Go figure.

DK
Click to expand...

Basically the scanner doesn't have the DMAX to "help" these slides. Try
using the RGB Exposure control on Vuescan. You can "pump" more light through
the negative. Crank the value up as high as it will go, 11 I think (probably
Ed Hamrick's nod to Spinal Tap).
 
Basically the scanner doesn't have the DMAX to "help" these slides. Try
using the RGB Exposure control on Vuescan. You can "pump" more light through
the negative. Crank the value up as high as it will go, 11 I think (probably
Ed Hamrick's nod to Spinal Tap).
Click to expand...

Definitely not for at least two reasons:

1. Ed is far too humorless to appreciate Spinal Tap ;o)
2. The exposure value in Vuescan is open ended - at least in theory
and on my Nikon - so this may be scanner specific.

Namely, once exposure is cranked up there is (yet another) Vuescan bug
which makes the exposure virtually random. In other words, the
exposure used for the scan does not correspond to the display after
the scan!! Indeed, the display will often "roll back" the exposure
display seemingly at random. In my tests this was around 100.

Don.
 
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