Canon fs4000 scanner

[ScottGregory]

Would like to hear from some forum members who may have used or be currently using the FS4000 digital scanner, the 4000dpi model. I have been considering the purchase of this unit and would like to know your results, good, bad etc. Thank you in advance.

[enigm4]

Hey

Just bought a FS4000US yesterday. Been having a fiddle with it.

Firstly the reason why I chose it was primarily for its relative value for money. The nearest equivalent competitor I felt was the Nikon which was more expensive. Also the Canon comes with the APS cartridge as standard.

Here's my first impressions:

Installing was a breeze I used USB and it worked with XP Pro with no probs

The unit itself looks pretty neat, and relatively compact.
When using the slides or negative holder, the holder moves in and out of the unit whilst scanning, hence make enough room for the unit to do this.

The plastic 35mm slider is made of hard plastic which is pretty difficult to unclasp i found. I'm kinda afraid of breaking it by exerting too much force on it.

In terms of quality, I tried scanning at full resolution 4000dpi @ 42bits, unfortunately the adobe photoshop the unit took literally forever to process (over half and hour before i gave up and ended the application) As such I have been unable to see the quality at that level. Photoshop seemed to be a rather slow application, my computer is 2.1 ghz P4 with 1gb ram and over 60Gb free disk space, you would think this would be enough, alas not.

Perhaps I didn't install adobe right??

I was sucessful in scanning at 4000dpi at 24bits, this time exporting the finished product into Corel Photopaint since again photoshop took forever.

I'm a real amateaur in photo editing, but from a standard scan at hi resolution, the scanned images seemed to have a lot of noise, even when the image was zoomed out significantly u can still see the noise.
Is this normal?

I did an APS scan, 20 snaps took over 1.5hrs to scan at 4000dpi @ 24 bits

Thats all so far

Jon

[ScottGregory]

Thanks for your reply. I do believe, at least from what I have read so far myself about this scanner, that the problems you mention, are not usual. The fact that Photoshop is taking that long is not right. You might try Vuescan or silverfast software as a comparison. I found with my first scanner, the Nikon LS2000, that the proprietary Nikon scanware shipped with the unit was not very user friendly in my opinion. I changed over to Vuescan and had much better success.
You might want to check the Luminous Landscape website about the FS4000 and see what they have to say.

Thanks and good luck. Keep us posted.