New Scanner: CanoScan 4400F

I finally picked a new scanner. I had my mind set on this one by Canon but was overwhelmed by its size when I finally checked out. It has the capacity to scan 35mm film, slides, and 120 size film.

I'd originally thought about getting into medium format photography using my Yashica 12 TLR. The large negative format offers the ability for some really detailed pictures as this page shows, but it's also more expensive than 35mm film. Working life and living in Toronto means that I have less time to walk around and take pictures so I haven't really done much in terms of photography.

I decided to scale back and settled for this smaller scanner. It's limited to 35mm negatives and slides but offers the same resolution. I also like the film holder that comes with it. It's easy to load and it holds the film pretty flat.

The scanner also automatically scans each frame individually and shows a preview. You can then select the frames that you want scanned and have them saved to a directory. It works pretty well and the scanning speed is reasonable.

I haven't really looked into using it with linux so I have to boot into Windows to scan photos. The one thing that I don't like about the system is that you have to select an application to load the pictures into after scanning. The system comes with ArcSoft photo editing software so I selected it just to get it to work. I didn't use the software really because I'm used to editing photos in GIMP now. I tried getting the Canon scanning toolbox to load the scanned images into gimp directly but kept getting a .dll error. It's annoying but not that big of a deal.

Overall, I find the scanner works pretty well. I'm going to get a lot of use out of it since I have two bulk rolls of 35mm Kodak Tri-X to use...once I get around to taking some pictures on a regular basis.