I recently bought a Canon CanoScan LiDE 700f (who makes up these product names???) to replace an older scanner that has no drivers for anything later than Windows XP.
It’s a nice little scanner, comes with decent, if peculiar, software. Of course, the software for every scanner I’ve owned has earned the Badge of Peculiarity with ease. Do hardware companies hire Martians to write this stuff? Hey, I bet that’s where the product names come from too!
But the Canon-supplied software does a nice job and has made it VERY easy to boom through my current project, batch-scanning gazillions of mostly B/W family photos.
Today I decided to have a go with some 35mm slides. After all, Canon advertises this as a film scanner. And there began a tale that didn’t end well.
When Canon says “film” it turns out that they mean “strips of unmounted film”. I learned this from various reviews that I ran across while trying to figure out how, exactly, one scans slides. The answer: One Doesn’t. It just doesn’t DO that.
And while I might have experimented with removing the film chips from the slide mounts in order to scan “film”, the same reviews unanimously complained about the awful results from even unmounted film scanning.
I don’t feel particularly abused, since the scanner does what I bought it for and does it well. And instead of worrying about where to store the goofy film scanning attachment so I can find it the next time I need it, I can just toss it out.
Net: Nice scanner for flat documents but if you want to scan film (mounted or not), keep looking. You don’t want to wave your credit card over this one.
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