I have a small mission, it's a self imposed one. Scan some old slides, and see if it's actually worth any time or effort to do so.

My first portion is to decide on what scanner to use. You can get auto-feeding, mass-scanning slide scanners for up and above $1000, but that's just not realistic. I shopped around and found a couple of affordable candidates. A couple of Canon scanners the 500F ($150) and 4200F ($130), and a the HP scanjet 4850 ($150).

All of these scanners claim to do film and slides. When I arrived at the store to chose one I looked at the display models and I realized something. The pretty 500F doesn't do what they claimed. It does not do “Mounted Film” (also known as a slide, my main intent) Not to mention, the film strips that it will do it will only do two frames at a time instead of a whole strip. Scratch that one. It was pretty, that's about it. The HP was a monstrosity of a beast. It boasted, and really did, ability to scan 4 slides at a time. Unfortunately the sheer size turned me off. So I walked away with the 4200F, which does two slides, or four frames from film. Not bad for the price, I guess.

Unfortunately right off the bat all these candidates failed in a department that's very very important to me: Linux support. Not support of a driver or application direct from the companies themselves, but support with the community; towards those people who will do the dirty work if they are given the support from the company. But, that is another day and another rant.

On with the scanner itself. It's big in size and since I'm being forced to use my windows machine for the first time this year, it had better be worth it.

Off the bat we have another issue. I have a hard time trusting any hardware that has a warning on it claiming “Warning! Install the software before connecting the scanner!” That warning right there tells me that a) there's a problem with the drivers being installed after the fact, and b) the software is going to suck.

Regardless of that warning, the ugly software installer did it's job. It had a horrible user interface and went through the rounds of installing all the software that it supposedly needed. It kindly forced me to reboot with out the option of deferring after finishing. That was great.

Once my system has rebooted, I plugged in the scanner and it appeared to work. That's a good thing.

I loaded two slides into the adapter, which mounts into the lid of the scanner itself. It's backlit, which is obviously a requirement for slides and film. I pressed the front panel 'scan' button, and waited. I waited... and finally a window popped up with options. I expected to have to press something else, but just as I was about to click another button a scan dialogue popped up and went to work.

It detected that I had two slides in this and dumped them into 'ArcSoft PhotoStudio' for me. The pictures didn't look so hot. They were extremely dark, and the cropping (which was supposed to be automatic) was off. It had happily included the frame of the slide. A brighter slide was used (a day light picture with lots of sky) and it managed to scan alright, but still not very good. I quickly determined that the default settings for this, just won't do. Which is also a bad thing because this is targetted towards regular users.

After that, there's only one place to go. Into the 'Advanced' scanning info. Clearly the user friendly, and easy to do portion of this application isn't going to do justice.

After fiddling around with the inner settings of the actual driver I managed to get some slides to scan in an 'ok' looking manner. I had to manually crop the frame out of them all, and apply a few filters to get them to look half decent. The scanning tool's cropping ability on slides is also a crap shoot. It only lets you zoom in once. By once I mean one click and that's it. You go from a tiny thumbnail to a small thumbnail and you're still guessing where you should actually put the crop line. Not overly impressive. I guess that's what you get for a lower price. right? I'll just tell myself that.

Slide Scan Samples:

Even after tweaking the settings in advanced, I found it very difficult to get any nice colour. The slides looked fine with the backlight, but when scanned and as I attempted to fix the contrast and colours using their software, it just didn't have the power. I don't want to have to go buy more software after I have already purchased this scanner. As far as the quality goes, you certainly won't find yourself getting high quality printouts with these. Even at a high resolution scan, which in theory should print nice, the on screen quality wasn't much different from a lower resolution scan. And with that, I highly doubt a printout would gain any clairity.

Being slightly let down by the 4200F's inability to deliver as hoped for on the slide scanning, I figured I'd let it have a go at scanning some film. As it turns out, I have a bunch from before 2001 sitting around, so I'll just use the first one I grab.

Using the very same adapter that holds two slides, I am able to put in one strip of film. 4 frames to be precise. In this case, the scanner performed quite nice. Ignoring the fact that I actually put the film in backwards, you can actually read the writing on eve's face (which is mirror reflected) when scanned at 600dpi. The default settings, of course, still resulted in a crappy scan of the frame. You can tell clearly by the samples provided that the default scan is washed out, where as the manual is clear (and looks just like the actual print I have of this, but hey, you can't tell that!) The cropping in this mode also worked almost flawlessly. This scanner actually has something going for it. Not very much mind you.

Film Scan Samples:

As for speed, the scanner is on USB 2, which should be pretty fast. But it wasn't, really. It took about 45 seconds to one minute per frame to scan the film at a decent (printable) resolution. This doesn't really have anything to do with the type of interface Canon decided to use though, this is just a case of 'scanning takes time' so I won't really hold this one against it.

Overall, with Canon's ugly software bundle of ugly software, poor default settings and lack of support for anything but Windows (even Mac OS isn't supported by Canon, which surprises me.) Maybe it's my fault for expecting so much out of a product that has an affordable price tag on it. I just wish that manufacturers (Canon, Logitech, HP, and more) would actually take some effort into packaging good software with their products. Perhaps even ship it with some decent default settings. These things aren't targetted at people who know how to use the advanced button on their scanner software. Sure, “it just works” the way it is, but it looks like crap and that crap is a direct reflection of this product and how a user will feel after using it for the first time.

I give this thing a rating of 1 out of 5. Now, time to attempt to scan as many slides as I can and hope to hell they look ok before taking it back.