Return to 1997 CHRISTMAS Index
Return to 1997 CHRISTMAS Index
Japanese photographic giant Canon's latest sortie into the world of digital imaging has resulted in a most remarkable piece of kit. Real estate agents, engineering firms and the medical profession, indeed any small business involved with collecting and using photographic quality images on their PC's would do well to look seriously at this device.
CanoScan 2700 is a small, compact, high resolution, colour film scanner, which handles conventional 35mm slide and film formats, as well as the increasingly popular APS format. Measuring a mere 310mm deep x 85mm wide x 145mm high, CanoScan fits very neatly on your desktop.
A SCSI device, it requires a special card plugged into your PC. A cheap and cheerful card suitable for most PC's is supplied free with the scanner.
On removing the scanner from its packing, one notices a variety of bits and pieces including some curious looking devices for holding various types of film. Despite this, setting up the CanoScan is remarkably simple, nearly as easy as it says in the book!
Once set-up, the image quality is very good indeed, with a scanning resolution of up to 2700 dots per inch. Close inspection reveals slight flaws in image quality when compared with the results of more expensive professional film scanners – though one has to look hard to find them.
Bulk scanning demands a certain degree of manual dexterity of the user. Fortunately, the film holder bundled with CanoScan, though rather flimsy looking is very easy to use. Hinging from one end, its clever design means one can easily fit even the curliest filmstrips into the holder.
On the downside, the frames on Canon film holder are slightly undersized thus obscuring the edges of the negative. Consequently one cannot quite scan the full area of the film. However, it should be noted that very few development and printing houses print the entire negative either.
APS scanning shows the entire negative, plus a little bit around the edge as well.
Its compactness, portability and ease of connection to personal computers mean that a complete image-scanning set-up can be quickly installed on your desktop. The only downside is the amount of time it actually takes to scan individual images, and even when one has built up a rhythm, I think it would be difficult to scan more the one complete film an hour.
Since some businesses might have literally thousands of slides to process, the success of this product could result in local temporary staff agencies doing a roaring trade!
The software that ships with the CanoScan is quite excellent. Truly `plug and play', one simply puts the CD-ROM into a Windows 95 machine, runs the set up program and off it goes.
The genuine 32 bit `TWAIN 32' scanner driver software is very attractive. It can be called from any `TWAIN compliant' photographic editing software such as Paintshop Pro or Microsoft Photo Editor. Alternatively Canon's scanning software be launched by itself. Running independently of a bitmap editor, it scans and saves files into internationally recognised JPEG format.
Unfortunately the software drivers that ship with CanoScan are for Windows 95 and not for Windows NT. No mention of NT could be found in any of the technical literature.
In the absence of any technical advice, I installed CanoScan's TWAIN drivers on a SCSI-enabled Windows NT 4 machine. In theory, genuine 32 bit Windows 95 drivers should also work on NT. My tests showed that CanoScan software worked, and worked well on NT. So why doesn't Canon say so?
Image scanning is heavy on your computer's resources. So you will need a reasonably fast PC, a Pentium or better, with at least 32 MB RAM, running Windows 95 or Windows NT version 4. The PC also needs a CD ROM drive.
Large image files can be up to a staggering 18 megabytes each. Even using compression technology, scanning photographs can quickly gobble up a vast amount of hard disk space. So heavy users should consider a mass storage device such as floptical disc or CD recorder – both available for under £300.
At around £600 the CanoScan 2700 represents very good value for money, considering professional film scanners can cost ten times the price.