Scanners: Reviews

Reviews say the Canon CanoScan 8800F is the best multipurpose scanner; it does a particularly good job scanning photos, slides and film negatives. It can scan twelve 35mm negative frames or four 35mm slides at a time.… Reviews say color quality and clarity are good, and speed for both print and text scans are quick. Included is Canon's proprietary technology for correcting scratches and dust. Reviews say the 4800-dpi Canon is an excellent choice for photo hobbyists, but it's a fine document scanner as well. It's both PC and Mac compatible.

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Reviews say that the entry-level Epson V200 scanner is a great value with a surprisingly strong feature set. It's not as fast or software-loaded as more expensive scanners, but it's twice as fast as other budget scanners… and bundles decent photo editing and optical character recognition programs. The 4800-dpi optical resolution and 48-bit color depth deliver good scans with accurate color reproduction, and the transparency adapters for slides and filmstrips are well designed. The V200 is PC and Mac compatible.

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Epson scanners draw raves for their photo-scanning technology, so it's no surprise that experts prefer Epson's Perfection V700 and more sophisticated sibling Perfection V750-M Pro (*est. $750) for advanced hobbyist and… professional use. A dual-scanbed design offers 4800-dpi scanning for prints and a 6400-dpi option for slides and film. The scanner can correct dust and scratch damage, and scanning for most film sizes is supported. The V750-M Pro ups the ante with improved optics, anti-reflective glass coating and a fluid mount kit to address dust and scratch conditions out of reach of software. Both models are PC and Mac compatible.

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The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 scanner is top-rated for businesses that need high-volume document scanning. This 600-dpi scanner has a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) and 18 page-per-minute scan speeds. The ScanSnap… can also scan both sides of a page at once, further speeding scanning times. Included is the full version of Adobe Acrobat, so you can scan documents in PDF format. The Fujitsu document scanner gets very high scores in reviews, but it's not designed for scanning photos or slides. There are separate versions of the Fujitsu for PC and Mac OS X (S510M).

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Although some flatbed scanners can also scan slides and negatives, professional and advanced-amateur photographers may prefer a dedicated film scanner like the 4000-dpi Coolscan slide scanner, which only scans 35mm slides… and film. Because it supports multi-pass scanning, pros can better control grain and other image fine-tuning. Reviews call the Coolscan's performance excellent and fast. If you only have a few scans to slide, however, the Coolscan is overkill since many flatbed scanners can also handle slides and negatives.

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