Canon LPT-99735987 CanoScan 5000F Scanner

I didnt buy the Canon Canoscan 5000F from Amazon.com, but this was the place I checked for all the specs, and where I read the reviews. I have been very pleased with the 5000F. I bought it yesterday, and in three hours last night, I was able to scan in nearly 200 photos. (200 photos singly; I havent tried the multiple scan feature yet, but I cant wait to go home and try.) Its very simple to use, and the quality is fantastic. It works as well or better than Id hoped it would. I especially recommend this to other serious amateurs like me!

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. Its 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. Theres 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 Ive 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.

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 Canons 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 doesnt 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.

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.

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, its great. Good color. Good sharpness. Though, its a somewhat larger than you might expect based on the pictures. But dont be misteken -- this is not a professional film scanner. Its 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 youre 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, its too much of a hassle. Again, hardware quality is great. But the software leaves a lot to be desired.

Hello, I purchased this for christmas 2003. Right out of the box I had the same problem as wshiii from Philadelphia, PA The glass was dirty on both sides and all the images (no matter what the resolution) had white spots all over them. I will call canon tonight to see what they can do. If they cannot fix it, I will look elsewhere for a replacement

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. Ive 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.