Strengths:lots of features, scan to pdf, high resolution, film negative & slide scanner, nice design/colors & blue power LED! Photoshop Elements 2.0 bundled for those without full Photoshop. Price below $200.
Posted Dec 25, 2004 - I am a photoshop user. I was looking for a replacement scanner. I have a broken HP scanner that is 6 or so years old. Was looking for a replacement after it stopped working. Was unimpressed by the local big computer store's HP scanners.
Came looking to good ol pricegrabber and did a sort by ratings. These reviews were very helpful. Was looking to get a scanner for archiving old photos and documents. This seemed like it had all the features. I got it shipped from CDW. Came next day fast shipping (I live in IL 4 hrs from warehouse which helps). I was a like little kid at Christmas, litteraly.
Easy setup. Install all the software (except arcsoft which is unnecessary as I own photoshop and photoshop album). It does come with photoshop elements 2.0 which is a novice version with the basic features of photoshop for editing photos.
Photos: The scanner is easy to use with the photoshop File--> Import--> Canoscan 8400F. Great built-in scratch & dust remover, auto tone, fade correction, etc with cleans up and gets majority of specs out on scan. Very very fast scans at low resolution as expected. It is slow at 1200 or 1600 dpi on photos because they are huge resolution and hundreds of megabytes in size. Get at least 512mb ram. I have 1GB and had no trouble with hi-res scans. Those with older machines must realize they may not be able to handle such hi resolution scanning without an upgrade.
Scan-to-text: I have played with the OCR tool and it has very nice advanced features to fully customize layout and scanning areas for scan-to-text. It will then allow you to proof and spelling correct in it's own text editor. Then you can output to unformatted text, text document, spreadsheet, etc.
PDF: PDF files come out great. You can set it to scan and launch in adobe reader. You can scan single or multiple pages into one pdf file. I am excited to archive some old documents and backup on DVD. I have already done several.
COPY: Nice feature. Automatically scans and sends to printer with touch of a button. watch out for margins and where you place 8.5x11 document. if your printer can't print in the first 1/4 inch or so then place the document down a bit to get it all in the copy. copy of b&w docs comes out crisp and clean with no greying. thinner paper might do this. it sometimes helps to place an extra sheet of plain white paper behind to avoid reflection and text bleed-thru.
Customize Buttons: A nice feature is that you can customize the function of each button and specify what actions and what applications launch when pressed. (e.g. when I hit scan button it launches photoshop)
This is by far the best scanner I have owned and has all the features I wanted and scans come out beautiful. I thought I would give something back since pricegrabber has come thru for me over the years. Hope this review was helpful.
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