 A Great Scanner for OCR |
| Review Date: August 20, 2010 |
| Reviewer: N Hartsell, |
I bought the CanoScan 8800F as an upgrade from my trusty CanoScan 4400F which I used for several years as part of a system that converts text to speech, as a reading aid for my low vision. I often scan a hundred or more pages at a time, and the procedure is highly repetitive; I hoped the 8800F would make the process go faster. As soon as I connected the scanner and made the first few scans, I knew I had made a good choice.
The 8800F has two advantages over the 4400F that I noticed immediately. First, there is no warm-up time for the light source in the 8800F. The 4400F has a cold fluorescent bulb that takes about 30 seconds to warm up when it is cold, and if it sits for a few minutes it does another short warm up before it will scan. The 8800F, on the other hand, has an LED light source that requires no warm up at all. The 4400F leaves its light source on for 12 minutes after a scan (this time is adjustable) to shorten the warm up time, whereas the 8800F shuts its light source off after each scan. Second, the 8800F scans faster than the 4400F. It seems to be about twice as fast, though I have not measured the scan times. These two advantages enable me to be about 50% more productive with the 8800F than with the 4400F, which makes the 8800F worth the higher price.
The two scanners have the same size platen (scanning surface) that takes document sizes up to A4. Most of my scanning is of books, and most of the time I can lay the book flat and scan two pages at once, though for larger books I am only able to scan a single page at a time. It would be nice to find a scanner that can accommodate larger formats, but I did not find one among the consumer scanners that I examined.
The 8800F has a power button, which the 4400F does not. Both scanners have the same buttons that you can use to initiate various scan operations. I never use these, as I always control scans through the software. On the 8800F the buttons are on the top rather than on the front, as for the 4400F, where I would often bump them with my arm, causing a flurry of dialogs to open on the screen.
The basic software user interface is the same for both scanners and consists of two applications that work together: ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 and Canon Scan Gear. PhotoStudio is a combination image editing and scanner control program. It calls Scan Gear to do each scan and accumulates scanned images which you can edit and save. The 8800F comes with several utilities which I haven't used, and also comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and 5.0.
If you do a lot of OCRing, as I do, avoid the ScanSoft OmniPage SE application that comes with the scanner. It is old and extremely buggy. I used it after I bought the 4400F and was in OCR hell for a year until I wised up and bought the latest version of OmniPage Professional, which seemed like magic after that. OmniPage can integrate with Scan Gear, which improves scanning efficiency for OCR operations. I also tried ReadIris 11, but it had a peculiar bug that duplicated letters in OCR'd text. ReadIris technical support never responded to my query about that.
The 8800F has lots of other capabilities that I have not tried yet. I understand that it shines as a photo, slide and negative scanner. I don't know if there is a better scanner out there, but the 8800F suits me very well.
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Canon Slide Scanning Tricks and Tips - 8800f
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| Review Date: August 17, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Stephen Paul West, Austin Texas |
| Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R10NDPTRFN83WR Stephen Paul West, Author and Artist in Austin Texas, shows how to use the Canon Scannner to maximum benefit for slides, negatives and other projects. See more at[...] |
CanoScan8800F-Zipping Fast!
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| Review Date: August 16, 2010 |
| Reviewer: HistoryScanner, |
I was totally amazed at the improvements made with this CanoScan 8800F
My last Scanner was great at the time (CanoScan 8400F)
The New 8800F is so much Faster & Great Scans! Also works just simply on my Macintosh!
& of course found it on Amazon at a great price! |
Awesome customer support from Canon
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| Review Date: August 10, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Laney, |
| I purchased the CanoScan 8800F to digitize over 2000 slides and am very satisfied with my purchase. Being able to preview each slide and adjust the different setttings to improve the quality was great, but it was also easy to establish settings that seemed to work well for most slides. I am not a computer expert, so when I ran into difficulties with the software, I simply called Canon and received outstanding customer service. He walked me through the entire scanning process (including waiting while I went to the closet to find actual slides). He also explained that all the software provided in the box was not necessary (just offered for free from other companies). The Canon software works great, and thanks to customer service, was easy to understand and use. I would highly recommend this scanner along with the customer support from Canon. |
35 slide digitizing
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| Review Date: August 9, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Deane Shank, Boulder, CO USA |
| No technical details here. I bought it to digitize 35 mm slides and it takes about 5 minutes to do 4 slides at 300 dpi. Quality is good enough that they are fine on a 35 in. TV. |
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