Is this any good?

For that kind of money, nothing is going to particularly good.

Seeing as BigAl-sa mentions Canon, I'll add my 2c. I had a 4400F and it was rubbish. I don't expect it's direct decendants to be any better.
 
marine1 said:
Hey guys I have hundreds if not thousands of slides from many moons ago.
I want to scan them to PC, is this any good? Will the resolution be good?
Thanks
Click to expand...


Whatever you buy prepare yourself for the most boring process ever :D
 
Sorry for only mentioning this now BUT.... make sure that the device drivers for the scanner are compatible to your PC operating system.

My father-in-law just upgraded his PC with W7 pre-loaded and is now also in the market for a new scanner/slide scanner!!
 
MickeyD said:
Sorry for only mentioning this now BUT.... make sure that the device drivers for the scanner are compatible to your PC operating system.

My father-in-law just upgraded his PC with W7 pre-loaded and is now also in the market for a new scanner/slide scanner!!
Click to expand...

We getting a bit OT here, but what you can try is to put XP in a VirtualBox under W7 and run the scanner from there. That's how I've gotten my Canon 8800f to work "under" Linux :D
 
BigAl-sa said:
We getting a bit OT here, but what you can try is to put XP in a VirtualBox under W7 and run the scanner from there. That's how I've gotten my Canon 8800f to work "under" Linux :D
Click to expand...
Thanks, but, this is my 70-odd y.o. father-in-law who wants to (1) switch on PC (2) switch on scanner (3) use said items. :)
 
koffiejunkie said:
For that kind of money, nothing is going to particularly good.

Seeing as BigAl-sa mentions Canon, I'll add my 2c. I had a 4400F and it was rubbish. I don't expect it's direct decendants to be any better.
Click to expand...

Hey Koffie, what didn't you like? I know two guys wanting to do the same as m1 and they bought the 4400f and are pretty chuffed with the results (I can't actually comment on the results as I haven't seen them).
 
BigAl-sa said:
Hey Koffie, what didn't you like? I know two guys wanting to do the same as m1 and they bought the 4400f and are pretty chuffed with the results (I can't actually comment on the results as I haven't seen them).
Click to expand...

Poor colour, mostly. Also, when I set it to reasonably high resolution, it's a lot better at picking up surface artifacts of the film than the picture in it.

I'll accept that it might have been me not knowing what the hell I'm doing, but I spent several weeks trying to get realistic looking results out of it, both with the cumbersome Canon software and with Vuescan. If it's going to take this much trouble to get it done, I'm not interested. Oh, and it's sloooooooow.

This is the best I got out of it, and it's worlds apart from what the slide looks like. This was after a fair deal of work in Aperture to get the colours a bit closer to where they should be.

 
koffiejunkie said:
Poor colour, mostly. Also, when I set it to reasonably high resolution, it's a lot better at picking up surface artifacts of the film than the picture in it.
Click to expand...

I see you have some fluffies in the pic. The biggest problem is getting a clean scan - that involves cleaning the slide/negative, as well as the scanner. A flatbed scanner means you have to clean the glass AND the cover for the light in the lid (you usually only have to clean the scanner once per session). I wasted huge amounts of time cleaning and re-cleaning a slide before I realised that the dust was on the light cover in the lid :(

wrt colour, I switch off everything in the twain software that has anything to do with image enhancement - I prefer to do that myself. However, the stupid Canon software always switches on "Auto tone" everytime you start it. I found that this Auto tone give the scanned image a horrible red cast. Vuescan should bypass that, especially if you use the presets for the particular film you used (although on second thoughts, Ed Hamrick never developed his own drivers for these particular scanners, he uses the Canon drivers).

The speed on the 8800f is acceptable when compared with the equivalent Epson scanners (again, I can't comment on what the 4400f does). That speed is light years ahead of what my Epson Filmscan 200 could do - that was slow.

I do agree with Ponder, that is a nice pic!
 
Thanks BigAl-sa. With regards to the dirt, I was just trying to get the process right before I spend time painstakingly cleaning everything.

You're right: VueScan uses the Canon drivers. At first it didn't pick up the scanner at all, since I have an Intel Mac and Canon was still shipping PPC-only drivers (which works in OSX because Canon's own software is also PPC-only). Only once OSX 10.6 came out did Canon finally release their kit in Intel binaries. Nevertheless, the software still sucks. I use the scanner more for documents, and that's another area where the Canon software was unbelievably frustrating to use. I sold it and bought an HP instead (software is loads better) and will get a dedicated film scanner at some point. Looking at one of the Plustek jobbies or maybe a 2nd hand Nikon off eBay if I stumble upon a good deal.
 
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