Rated 
Very Pleased
Started Dec 23, 2006
Strengths: Good quality scans, Good software included, Elegant design
Weaknesses: No printed manual, Takes time to learn to use well
I did a lot of comparison shopping before purchasing and this scanner offered more than the competitors at a better price.
My prior scanner was a UMAX Astra 2200 that I used for scanning pictures and as a convenience copier, but UMAX stopped updating the drivers when Windows XP came out so even though I could still scan, much of the functionality had been lost. The Canoscan 8600F is a tremendous upgrade. The quality of the scans is very good.
There should be a printed manual. On the one hand, the scanner is deceptively easy to use. The one-touch buttons for copying, photofilm, email and pdf have all worked great. The operating software is well designed and user friendly. The included software programs, particularly Photoshop Elements, have been easy to use for the most common tasks, but to learn to use them to their full capabilities would take time and effort.
But, even so, while this is only a high-end consumer level scanner (as opposed to a professional level scanner), it is not a toy. To get it to perform at its best requires some effort. My first scan of a picture was very grainy. It turns out that for certain pictures (such as pictures in magazines, and at least some digital photos like the one I was scanning, you have to turn de-masking off to get a sharp scan. Had I used the "Easy Scan" setting and selected "Magazine" as the source, the software would have turned off de-masking automatically. But nowhere did the on-screen manual tell me that issue until I went to the "troubleshooting" section.
Similarly, my first photocopies were not good because the scanner was showing the white background of the page I was copying as multi-colored. Copies were good on default setting.
Scanning of multiple slides is easy (once I figured out how to set the scanner up for slide scanning), with excellent results. Creation of multiple page pdf documents was a breeze. I have not yet tried film scanning or the optical character reading program.
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