Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Good News, Bad News. I purchased this scanner based on numerous positive reviews. I was looking primarily for a negative/slide scanner, but I did not want to lay out the bucks for a dedicated slide scanner. I actually would have considered one of the higher-end Epsons, like the V500, but I was sold on the LED illumination and quickstart capabilities of the 8800F. For the record I have owned an Epson 1650 and an Epson 1240U, upgrading each time to take advantage of some new capability. None of my scanners, ranging all the way back to my first PlusTek has died on me. First the bad news. Negative scanning is NSG (not so good). That is not to say that the Canon is not good compared to other scanners, but it takes about 1 minute to scan a single negative panel at 1200dpi, and it takes about 4 minutes to scan at 2400dpi, the math works. 2X linear equals 4X area. After doing a couple of test scans, I came to the conclusion that the incremental quality of 2400dpi was not worth 3 minutes per slide for a family photo archive project. I was also coming to the conclusion that 1 minute per negative panel would not really work for me. On to the good news. I decided to scan 4 prints. I took them out of one of our family photo albums, and started the scan. WHOA! The machine scanned the photos in the amount of time it took my Epson 1650 to do a preview scan. The wonders of modern technology! I checked the default resolution, and it turns out to be 300dpi. I had experimented in the past with resolutions up to 4800dpi for family photos, and finally realized that 300dpi is sufficient for all normal (4x6 etc) size prints. I only use higher resolutions for smaller prints. The Canon guys have fixed every problem I have ever had with a scanner. The negative holder does a GOOD job of flattening out curved negatives. The lid is HEAVY, which is good, so I don't have to dig out a fat book to help flatten curved photo prints. The LED illuminators come on instantly, so no waiting for the fluorescent lights to warm up. And finally, it's FAST. Last but not least, if you use their scanning utility (with the zippy name of MP Navigator EX) it puts EXIF information if you store your images in JPEG. I have always thought that would be an excellent improvement to scanners. I have been scanning family type photos for about 10 years now, and I have to say that the Canon CanoScan 8800F addresses every improvement I have dreamed up on my own for flatbed scanners. Now if they can make a scanner that will scan 4 negatives in 7 seconds, I will deem them perfect. In the meantime, I have to rate them as 'almost perfect'. The only reason I give them 4 stars is that I technically purchased the unit to scan negatives and found 1 minute per negative panel to be a slight disappointment. For normal print photo scanning I would give them a 5 easily. The control panel for Amazon does not let me select 4.5 addendum: 2008-02-02 I have used this scanner to scan some more slides. They still take a while, but I have the slides, what am I going to do? The only way to get the EXIF information is if you use the MP Navigator program. I have tried using the TWAIN facility with both Irfanview and Picasa. The scans are fine, but no EXIF information. I was concerned after scanning some Whale Watching slides, as the 2nd-4th panels would not have the edges of the slides detected well. The water was deep blue. After scanning slides with landlubber type backgrounds, grass, dirt, etc., all of those had slide edges detected properly. All I had to do with the Whale Watching photos was crop to edit out some black borders. My Epson 1650 would sometimes screw up the orientation of the slide. It would decide that a landscape slide should be portrait, cutting off the sides, or a portrait slide was landscape, cutting off the top and bottom. It was a major nuisance when that happened, and even if I attempted to preview the slide multiple times, rotating it, for some slides it would never get the image right. So far I have not had that problem with the 8800F.