Canon CS8600F

I bought the CS8600F to scan my collection of over 2,000 35mm B&W and colour photos which date back to 1972. All of them have faded and some are in fairly poor condition. After a bit of a learning curve regarding how the various settings and adjustments affect the final digital image, I was getting amazing results especially from negatives. Faded brownish old colour photos were looking like they were taken last week! I've had some reprinted by the local Fuji outlet with excellent results. Friends have been stunned by how good they look.

It takes a while to scan negatives and slides, like about one minute each at 1200 DPI. From reviews I've read of other scanners in this class, this is one of the faster ones. Photos and printed documents are scanned very much quicker.

The ScanGear software allows you to tweak every aspect of the scanned images to get them as close as possible to how they originally were, but you have to keep checking the settings as stated above. The negative and slide holders are very well designed, as is the whole package.

Of course it can't do the impossible. Some of my oldest negatives were originally under-exposed and have had severe fading and colour shifts in the 35 years since then. ScanGear does the best it can with them, but they still don't look right. People in those old under-exposed photos come out with uncorrectable brilliant red lips, for example.

It scans ordinary printed documents very quickly to produce very sharp clean images. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software seems to work OK, though it needs to be trained to recognize some characters.

The software package also allows you to turn scanned documents into .PDF files or attach them to e-mails, but I haven't tried out those functions. I prefer to do things like that in a less automated way.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the CS8600F scanner and would thoroughly recommend it.