Customer Reviews

Canon CanoScan 5000F Scanner

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was researching scanners for a long time and finally debated between the Epson 2400 and the Canoscan 5000F which cost about the same. The Epson 2450 Photo seemed to have better image quality but cost about twice as much, and the Canoscan 8000 is only a bit faster and allows you to scan more slides at once than the 5000 model. Reviews seemed to favor the Canon model for color accuracy and the Epson model for speed. Moreover, Epson's support for Mac OS X is flaky and you have to download extra drivers from Epson's website.

Well, I got the Canoscan and I'm very pleased with my purchase. Both image quality and speed surpassed my wildest expectations as I had an Umax Astra 1200 before. The scans are fast and colors are absolutely brilliant. Since I mostly scan color slides, I was again pleased to find out that the quality is really, really good. Scanning slides at 300dpi for 4x10 prints is a good compromise of quality and speed. You can scan two slides at once, which takes about 5 minutes. Slide scanned at 2400dpi take about 10 minutes and result in very large files of 250MB or more in Photoshop. Again, scans at this resolution are absolutely brilliant and are great for 8x10 enlargements. The local camera shop can't produce any better enlargements.

Canon supports Mac OS X out of the box. No need to send in a card to Epson or download beta-version Twain drivers from their web site. Just install the software, reboot, plug in the scanner and you're all set. The included software works well with PhotoShop and offers many customization options.

All in all, if you're looking for a high quality scanner at a reasonable price, the CanoScan 5000F is probably the best you can get.

I waited months to purchase a scanner after a bad experience with a Visioneer product shortly after I switched to XP (home edition). Goodness, was it worth the wait! I purchased the Canon based on my excellent experiences with other product lines, and knowing that this was the next, XP-designed generation. Truly plug'n'play, I was up, operational and scanning within five minutes. Do follow their advice and install the software BEFORE you plug the scanner into your USB port. I have an older USB port, and it has worked wonderfully right out of the box. Again, note that your computer may put up a little dialogue box saying "You are using a hi-speed USB device on your lo-speed USB port," but ignore it,as Canon advises you to. Everything works and works well. I use it to scan documents almost exclusively, but was favorably impressed with the accessories for film/negatives/slide scanning. The software is a little cumbersome, but that's a minor quibble.

Being an amatuer photographer, I wanted a scanner that could scan slides and negatives. The 5000F is a flatbed scanner so it can also scan documents which makes a very versitile and useful scanner. Usually flatbed scanners do NOT make good film and slide scanners; the 5000F is an exception. It's actually based on a rather decent CCD technology rather than the cheaper CIS chip (most flatbeds), which is the reason for the very good film/slide scanning performance. It has a special back-lit slot in the cover for slides and negatives. You can scan up to 3 negs or 2 slides at once. It also has an IR dust and scratch removal sensor that works fairly well (but not on scratches). The quality is very very good but the scans are quite slow, even with a USB-2 connection. You must remove a white backing board, insert the negs or slides in provided carriers, and position the carriers in the scanner. The graphics software, Archsoft PhotoStudio, is quite adequate but not nearly on the same level as Adobe Photoshop. There's MUCH additional software for creating photo albums, photo databases, OCR, etc.. Installation is very easy. It took me 20 minutes to install and start scanning after a bad day at work! The quality of the scans is excellent, the scanning software is very easy to use, the software package is quite comprehensive, scanning negs and slides requires some fumbling, and the scans are slow (but I've seen slower). The quality of the slide/negative scans is the MOST important feature to me and the 5000F delivers. **For the money**, I am VERY happy with the package overall.

My father always told me I would never go wrong with a Canon. Canon has proven my father's point time and time again, and they don't fail to do so with the 5000c. I made the mistake of purchasing a lesser-name scanner to save myself [money]. When the quality and reliability were found lacking, I packed the lesser-name up and left the store with the 5000f.

I'm so thrilled by the quality i don't know if I can write a detailed, fact-based review on the scanner! All I really need to say is IT'S INCREDIBLE! DON'T EVER BUY ANY OTHER BRAND! However, I know you want details. Here they are: The film/slide scans are AMAZING! They're crisp and clear --honestly unparalleled by any scanner (even professional models) I have ever used. Many scanners will blur your slides or provide unacceptable resolution for any serious utility. Not the case here.

Standard scans are great. I MUST mention the FARE (Film Automatic Retouching and Enhancement) technology employed by the 5000F. How many times have you been digging through your storage to find a great old photo that has been marred by the hands of time? Using FARE, you won't spend hours retouching the photo in your photo-editing software --it's all done AUTOMATICALLY! No example picture could ever explain how well it works. Go to a store and try it yourself. You WILL be blown away.

All of these features are tied together with a USB 2.0 interface. Gone are the days where you listen to your scanner scan, stop, send, scan, stop, send. With the increased bandwidth of this new technology scanning is quick and easy.

I'll say it to you this time: You can't go wrong with a Canon!

The Canon 5000F scanner provides high quality scans at a reasonable price. Being a professional photographer and newspaper cartoonist for 15 years, I've worked with numerous scanner models ranging from HP and Epson to even Microtek units. Yet, for the price, Canon outperforms them all with a "print-perfect" optical resolution of 2400x4800 dpi.

I mostly use the scanner for digitalizing my artwork at a resolution of 1200dpi at an output scale of 100%. The scans appear crisp and clear with well-defined gray tones and contrast levels. Given the ease of the scanning software, it's simple to make a slight adjustment during the pre-scan to change the contrast and brightness to fit your needs.

Also, the Canon 5000F is a well-built unit. All low-priced scanners consist of a plastic body for weight purposes, however, the Canon 5000F employs a solid and sturdy drive unit to guide the movement of the lamp carriage.

I previously bought the HP Scanjet 3970 because of its attractive price, but I also quickly discover its cheap construction, worthless 3-month warranty and its loose connections. Thankfully, I was able to return it for a refund.

At work, I used an Epson 2400 scanner, a comparable unit, that fell apart from the hinges inward. The Epson 2400 could not reproduce the color of photographs as naturally as the Canon 5000F. When scanning grayscale images, the Epson 2400 also could not detect gray tones as well as the Canon unit.

The Canon 5000F wonderfully reproduces the color of photographs and slides when I scan images to be posted on the web. However, for scanning negatives or slides, I use a film scanner to achieve the best results. When scanning negatives on a flatbed scanner, the machine must scan the images at a higher resolution than you intend to print. For example, scanning at 2400dpi will magnify the negative image and allow for decent printing at 600-1200dpi.

For beginners or professionals, the Canon 5000F provides excellent results at a reasonable price. There's very little difference in scanning speeds when a person scans an image at high resolutions, because we're talking about an image file 40MB or bigger. I haven't seen where the flimsy HP or Epson models scanned any faster than the Canon models. After all, if you want quality, be patient. It might take 1-2 minutes for a 2400dpi scan of a picture, but you should be pleased with the results.

For the best color reproduction, clarity and construction, I highly recommend the Canon 5000F.

Note: The Canon LiDE series of slim scanners also provide decent results, but they use a different method of scanning than the Canon 5000F in order to make the scanner 1.5 inches tall. The Canon LiDE series use LEDs for the light source and a contact image sensor (CIS) to capture the scanned image. This system, given the material you're scanning, might not provide you with the color tones you're seeking in order to print large photographs.

Instead, the Canon 5000F uses the traditional cold cathode lamp as the light source and a CCD as the scanner element which still provides the best color and grayscale reproduction.

Enjoy!

Not happy with the drivers for this scanner. I bought this scanner in March 2003, and the CD-ROM that came with it included non-current drivers that were not Windows XP certified. The manual told me to install these uncertified drivers over the strongly-worded warning from the operating system not to do so. Within minutes of installing the drivers on my new (<1 month old) computer, the operating system experienced three crashes. I removed the drivers, downloaded the new but still uncertified version of the drivers from Canon's website, installed the new version, and used Norton Utilities to repair the damage from the first installation. Even after all this, the drivers are still flaky. From time to time the driver will return a general error saying that it could not communicate with the scanner. To correct this, I have to unplug the scanner and plug it back in (because there is no on/off or reset switch).

When this problem is not manifesting itself, scanning pictures/prints works fine. Good color and brightness accuracy. The multiple-image scan feature, which allows you to place several pictures on the bed at once and scan them all simultaneously into separate files, is very useful. Scan times for prints is very fast: about 15 seconds total for three prints laid out on the bed. My only wish is that the scan driver should automatically cure mildly skewed pictures because it is extremely hard to place multiple photos on the bed with zero degree accuracy. Unfortunately, it doesn't do this.

Scanning photographic negatives is totally different. Scan time is extremely long: about 10 minutes per three negatives at 600 dpi resolution. Also, the software is very unpredictable as to how it determines where one negative ends and the other begins. Often enough to be annoying, the scanner incorrectly sizes the negatives, requiring extensive manual intervention to override it. I have sometimes been forced to do a lot of manual jiggering with the negatives, including using opaque masks over some negatives to make it easier for the software to "automatically" detect where they begin and end. This feature is so twitchy that I sometimes just press the "preview" button twice and get differently-sized images.

Image quality of scanned negatives is variable: sometimes it is very good indeed. Other times it tends to produce an overexposed image with colors bled out, requiring more manual intervention.

Scans from negatives also tend to emphasize problems with the source material that may not have been obvious in the prints made from the same negatives. E.g., In pictures with a fairly flat-field of color in the background (such as lots of sky/water), there is a noticeable tunnel-vision effect which appears to have been caused by the point and shoot 35mm camera which took the photos. This was barely noticeable in the professionally-made prints, but quite apparent in the scan, requiring still more manual intervention to correct.

In short, this scanner certainly does a lot of things, some of them very well. But it nowhere near as stable in operation as I would have expected, and it is by no means fast or reliable enough to easily use it for anything like a large volume of slides or negatives.

Picked up the Canon ScanoJet 5500F from a local store and started scanning medical school applications. I hoped to fill out these converted applications later using Microsoft Word. So this review is focused primarily on the OCR and text scanning capability of this scanner.

Image Quality - 5/5 stars:
The 5000F scans are very detailed and clear. If the document is to be a copy for archving in JPEG or BMP format, the scan quality is more than sufficient.

Speed - 3/5 stars:
Scanning a typical letter size document took about 90 seconds at 300 DPI. This is acceptable but not as fast as the comparably priced HP Scanjet 5400.

Software 2/5 stars:
The OCR wizard is overtly complex, with at least 6-10 menu steps to scan, recognize, translate, and save one page of document. While the scan took about 90 seconds, the whole process took approximately 5 minutes - the output result was not nearly as clean as an automatic graphic scan, then manual OCR conversion.

OCR 1.5/5 stars:
The bundled character recognition software Omnipage SE performs poorly on both text pages and forms. The software has a tendency to add non-existent punctuations, misform letters, and misalign paragraphs and texts. When scanning an inkjet document, the error grows exponentially since the characters lack the sharpness of laser prints; sample text printed using HP Photosmart 7350 lead to about 5% spelling/typo error. This makes editing Canon 5000F scanned documents a very tedious task; for comparison, the HP Scanjet 5400 & HP software completed the scans on the same documents with no errors.

When working with forms, the OCR converted approximately 20% of the form accurately into Microsoft Word. Check boxes are often converted as big block letter "O", sometimes as a graphic, rarely as a check box. Overall very poor performance.

Recommendation:
If your scanner will primarily serve as a photo/graphic scanner, then this is a great value. If the document management feature in a scanner is important, I recommend looking into an HP scanner; there is a trade off - HP Scanners tend to trail Canon in graphic/film reproduction quality.

I bought this scanner because of the Canon name. My last scanner was a Canon, as is my printer. Both have performed flawlessly. I chose this particular model because of the USB interface so I could use it with both my Mac and my Hewlett Packard IBM Clone, and because it has an attachment to scan negatives.
As a basic scanner, it's great. Good color. Good sharpness. Though, it's a somewhat larger than you might expect based on the pictures. But don't be misteken -- this is not a professional film scanner. It's an OK mid-range consumer product. Colors tend to be off slightly when scanning negatives using the "dust and scratch" mode. Also, the "dust and scratch" mode is not available in resolutions over 600 dpi. I get the sense that otherwise, this is a powerful piece of hardware. The problem is that the software for it is horrible. The Mac and Windows versions are identical, and neither is really up to the task at hand. They are poorly laid out with no clear-cut way to perform simple tasks. If you're scanning into something like Photoshop, it can control the scanner through the TWAIN driver. But if you just want to make a quickie black-and-white scan of a piece paper to fax to someone, it's too much of a hassle. Again, hardware quality is great. But the software leaves a lot to be desired.

I received delivery in an unbelievable 21 hours! I had gone out and examined the Cannon 5000F before I placed the order with Amazon.com. I've installed it on Windows XP and am pleased beyond expectations. I primarily wanted it for film and slide copying. It does that and copying and photo scanning up to my expectations and standards. I 've been involved in photography (darkroom included) for years and find this great to bring my old technology up into the 21 century.

I purchased the scanner with a bit of apprehension, due to the price, and the disparity with other scanners. It seemed a wee bit costly -- not overly so, just a bit. Knowing that Canon is a good company, and knowing that poor scanners truly a horrible experience, I bit the bullet and bought it. The software, combined with the scanner, are superb. I highly recommend this product.