Customer Reviews

Canon CanoScan 8400F Flatbed Scanner

5 star:		(129)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

Got this scanner yesterday and out of the three brands I have had (UMAX, Epson, and nor Canon) this is the best. The color and picture quality are fantastic, so far. I would like to see a stand alone scanner app rather than having to use Image Capture or Photoshop. I work in 10.3 and it works without a hitch. I especially like the fact that the one touch buttons on the scanner actually work in OSX. This is a first for me. I also like that it has a power switch. I think that is what killed my last scanner.

And as an added bonus it does slides and negatives! Haven't tried that yet.

Definitely recommend.

Update: Have finally tried scanning negatives and the scanner did an amzing job. The saturation and detail was amazing! I was blown away by the image quality from the negative!

I purchased this scanner to scan some old photos, negatives and slides. I scanned a 4x6, a old 3x5 photo, and some film today and am very happy with the results. Still trying to get up to speed on the software, but seems to work very easily. Scans seemed to be very quick. I use Mac OSX and didn't have any problems. I haven't installed Photoshop Elements yet.

I had an Epson 636 that still works, but this scanner is several generations newer.

Quick service from Amazon as well.

Thanks.

Just received my scanner yesterday and it took me about 5-minutes to get it installed. I had a pile of odds-n-ends type documents I needed to scan plus a couple of photos and this scanner handled it all with ease. The scans were beautiful and crisp. I love the various "scan" buttons on the front of this thing but my only complaint is that I have to hold the button down for a second before it starts scanning. I would prefer it to respond a little more rapidly when I press the button but maybe this is to prevent accidental scans if someone were to bump a button by accident. This is only a minor complaint, however.

I think this is an excellent scanner for the money.

I have a Canon FS4000 film scanner that has a slightly higher resolution (3200 vs. 4000 dpi). However, I far prefer to use the new 8400 because it seems like it is about 20x faster. Most of this is the USB 2.0 interface. Most digital printers don't support more than 600-720 dpi right now anyhow so the additional dpi of my film scanner is mostly wasted. Also my film scanner I think was about $800 when I bought it several years ago. So I guess what I am trying to say is that this unit is a great deal for what it does.

I have to spend a fair amount of time cleaning hairs off of the surface of the glass of this scanner, but this is something you have to do with any scanner. Other than that, this unit is extremely easy to set up and use. So far, I have been extremely pleased with canon's imaging products!

I bough this model to replace my aging Lide 60. The advantages are the higher resolution, built-in FARE (which fixes scratches and dust), the ability to scan 35mm and 120/220 negatives. I already have a Canon slide scanner that I use for 35mm and APS, but I wanted to try scanning 120/200 from a panoramic camera.

One point to correct is that the Canon does come with a standalone scanning program - it's called Canoscan Toolbox. This program allows you to perform tasks such as scanning to a file (example JPEG), scanning to PDF, scanning then printing (essentially acting like a copier) and so on. Your preferred presets for each different type of scanning are saved as defaults. My most frequent use for this scanner is to scan multi-page articles into a single PDF document for archiving. The 8400F is excellent for this and is one of the few scanners that can do this easily. After scanning pages that contain text it can also convert these to pages where the text is selectable (ie the text has been OCR'd). Each page takes only about 15 seconds to scan at 300 dpi.

The scanning speed is excellent and about three times faster than my LIDE 60 at 300 dpi.

Dislikes are the separate power supply (necessitated for the illumination required for scanning negatives) and the cable that transfers power from the base of the unit to the lid. This tends to come undone ocassionally after frequent opening and closing of the lid.

All in all very good value for money and the best scanner for scanning large quantities of documents to PDF (or other formats).

Have had this scanner for two weeks now. Replacing old UMAX which was not compatible with my new Windows XP system. There is NO comparison.

The Canon is fast and easy to use. First load the enclosed software. Then just plug in the appropriate cables and you're scanning.

There are four buttons right up front on the scanner that allow you to choose Copy, Scan, PDF, or E-mail at the touch of a button. Make sure you hold the button down for at least two seconds or they don't operate. Probably a good feature as they would be easy to press accidently due to their convenient location.

I have scanned in many photos to use at the Kodak Easy Share (formerly Ofoto) website. I've also used the enclosed ArcSoft Photo 5.5 software (I like it better than my more expensive Jasc Photo Shop software) to scan and fix some old family photos that I was worried were lost forever. Dug around and found some boxes of old slides (who doesn't have those!) that I scannned into my computer. Now the pictures are available to look at anytime. This scanner also has a feature that allows you to scan in pictures off of films of various formats.

Text printing from scanned documents is clear and bright. I particularly like the copy feature that acts as a copy machine.

If you are a home user and hobbist who needs an excellent scanner with great software at a reasonable price, you won't go wrong with the 8400 F.

Paid $129.95 at newegg.com. This is cheaper than Amazon and includes free shipping and no tax to where I live. As a die-heart Amazon fan, I let Amazon know that it was available at a lower price elsewhere, but they never met the price.

I bought this scanner about a week ago and I have been scanning color film negatives as an alternative to scanning mediocre prints from the photo shop. Let me tell you, the scan quality is fantastic. I'm still getting the hang of software and color correction and all that, but even if you just scan it without any of the automatic correction options, the color negative scans look fantastic. The 3200dpi max resolution will allow you to print up to 20x30" prints (or even slightly larger actually) without seeing nasty pixelated spots. Printing can be done at any of the myriad online photo printing places like [...](large posters for cheap).

My only problem is that I'm using a USB 1.1 (stone age, I know) which really slows down the scanning process. A 35mm negative scanned up to 3600dpi and output at 125% with dust and lint remover option will take about 25minutes and produces a raw/tif image around 60-70MB large. This will produce a pixel width of 5000-6000. Converting that to the highest quality jpeg in the included Photoshop Elements software will be about 10% of the raw image file, so they will be at about 6-7MB. The jpeg stays the same size as far as pixels go.

The one gripe I have is the film holder. Although it's well designed and locks into place, about one out of eight times (2 x 4 frames - like when you use 24exp film, the holder holds up to 2 x 6 frames), it will sometimes show the "edges" of the film thus exposing parts of the negatives not in the frame. You can correct this by reseting the film and hitting the preview button again. The scanner detects the edges and crops it out automatically.

Although it can't compete with commercial scanners as far as speed and dpi, it's plenty enough for any film user who doesn't like the quality of prints that the photo shops make. You can use the cheap prints as sort of contact sheets, and decide which frames you want to archive/scan/print.

P.S., the 8400F is almost identical to the 9950F which is the 4800dpi version and has an upgraded sensor with the capacity to scan more film at a time. The software controls are, I believe, exactly the same, so check out the www.photo-i.co.uk review of the 9950F and the methods he uses to get the best scans.

***[UPDATE 3/20/2006] - I've upgraded my PC to a fast machine and scans take about 2-3 minutes for a 6x6mm frame (about 350% as large as 35mm film) scan in color at maximum dpi with the high-speed USB 2.0 connection. The file size is gigantic at around 140MB! If you're thinking of editing files of that size, make sure you have a pc powerful enough to handle them! So far my AMD64 2.2ghz/1gb desktop has been very reliable running Photoshop Elements 2.0 that came with the scanner, but it does slow down noticeably if I don't maintain it fairly often, and even the gigantic 250gig 7200rpm harddrive is starting to bog down after 4 months of scanning and filling up about 50gigs of memory strictly with film scans.

Also, the glass is relatively easy to clean and I haven't noticed any scratches that might affect the end scan, but a small patch of dirt of fungus or haze (about the size of a pencil eraser) on the inside part of the glass. It has been used in a fluctuating enviornment - a basement - but it's kind of annoying as it definitely shows up on certain scans. Not sure if it can be chalked up to user error or manufacturer's defect, but it is definitely an annoyance. Instead of getting another 8400F, I will definitely look to upgrade with the 9950F or whichever newer model is introduced.

I've finally found what I hope will be the last scanner I will ever buy. This Canon is the latest in a long line of scanners I've owned over the years. Until now, I could never find one that matched my all-time favorite, the Umax 1200S, which I had to put aside when ISA slots became obsolete.

The 8400F is extremely easy to set up and produces exceptional scans from prints, slides, and negatives. Especially negatives; I was amazed at the rich color and clarity I got from my initial scans. The scanner offers batch processing of images and it will let you save your settings. My last scanner, an HP, wouldn't do either.

The built-in restoration and enhancement features of the driver software make restoring old photos quite easy, although you will probably still want to load your scans into Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to complete their restoration.

Two criticisms: One, the templates that come with the scanner for scanning film and slides are a bit flimsy. I'm going to see if I can buy a backup set, just in case. Two (and this is highly subjective), I did notice that the colors were not quite as warm as comparable scans made with my HP. But a couple of mouse clicks in Photoshop remedied that.

Overall, I highly recommend this scanner.

I've had this puppy for two days, and I'm really impressed with its exceptionaly fast preview mode, fast photo and document scanning, superior color quality, excellent color processing of slides and 35 film negatives, and its great (but not perfect) driver user interface.

Comparing the scanner's auto tone with Photoshop auto levels, you can see that Photoshop does a little better on skin tones and contrasts. For quick jobs, the scanner's auto tone is fine, but I prefer to turn it off and manually adjust in Photoshop (using 3rd party color and shadow correction filters or even the built-in auto levels).

With the slide attachment, you can do 4 slides at a time. The software is intelligent enough to preview all 4 slides at a time, allowing you to rotate in software prior to scanning You do have to pay some attention to slide orientation when you put the slides into the slide tray, otherwise scanning color slides is a snap. Scanner color correction (auto-tone) works very well in this case.

Unlike slides, scanning 35 mm film negatives can be very slow at 1200 dpi (about 1 per minute). However, the quaility is very good. So good that you will see every blemish and lint on the negative.

I'm not using the supplied software, since I have better alternatives, but the bundle seems good enough to manage workflow.

Not a bulk film/scanner by any means but otherwise a great scanner at a great price. I did the Amazon free shipping thing and got it in about 10 buisness days (about 8 days ahead of schedule).

I got this scanner to replace an old one I had. It's so much better than my old one that there's no comparison. This scanner looks really nice too!
OK, aside from looks, this scanner just works very well.
Features I like:
- I can put multiple pictures on it and scan them at the same time. The software automatically breaks them up into separate files. This is a really nice feature. It saves me loads of time.
- It can do slides well. I have a lot of slides that are getting so old that they won't go in a slide projector anymore. This feature allows me to scan in my slides and save them to files individually. Again, it takes 4 slides and scans them in as separate files, making it easy to work with them.
- The quality of scans is very good.
Things I don't like so much:
- It only scans in 4 slides at a time. It's a very slow way to scan in 100's of slides that I have.
- The bundled image editing software is just adequate, but since I already have a favorite program to manage my images, this doesn't bother me much.

Recommendations:
If you just need to scan in pictures, documents, a small quantity of slides or negatives and other images, this is a great scanner - highly recommended.
If your main need is to scan in a lot of slides, this scanner will do it, but will take a very long time to do. There are faster and more economical ways to scan your slides - unless you have unlimited time.