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Compact and Stylish 9600 dpi Scanner with film scanning

User Reviews about Canon CanoScan LiDE 700F Color Image Scanner (3297B002)

I bought this scanner because I came across some old color film negatives I wanted to reproduce. The 700F comes with a negative adapter that makes scanning negatives quite easy. This scanner turned the negatives into good JPG pictures. I have owned a model 670 Cannon scanner for many years (that could not scan negatives) so learning to use this scanner was easy. Am very happy with this product. -- Great For Color Film Negatives

Nice price, document scans and photo print scans are good, integrates well with Photoshop, and the lid design works for bulky stuff. I'm not using it, but the vertical mount option is interesting. USB-only power is great--one less wall wart. The scan bar return is kind of slow, and the plasticy return sound doesn't inspire confidence (it's worked well for me, however).

The software has been frustrating and I've moved back to my old scanning package. Canon's software effectively imposes a workflow on you and defaults to a subfolder/naming structure that has to be constantly overridden. If you can live with their workflow it looks like scanning is pretty fast and painless. Haven't tried the photo scanning software. -- Great price, good scans, software clunky

After 6 months of use, I feel that I have to give everyone my opinion about this little scanner. As many around, I was driven to believe that this scanner was able to process films and slides. It is true that in my mind, I could not imagine that a brand such as Canon would make a scanner able to scan films but not mounted slides. Nevertheless this is the case here. BEWARE THIS SCANNER CANNOT SCAN MOUNTED SLIDES!! This is probably the most stupid marketing concept of the year, but the engineers at Canon just stopped short when developing this scanner. They imagined nice ergonomics, an even nicer low profile making it easy to slide under a desk, created an ingenious lid able to open 180 degrees, not to mention the ability to have the scanner installed angled on a desk, thus limiting the footprint. The scanner works very nicely for everyday tasks, it is easy to use, gives great results scanning documents and normal prints. The software, although always limited, is correct and regularly updated. With little practice, you are able to make it do whatever you want. It installs very well with Windows 7 64 bits and works fine from there. IMHO the major drawback of the software is the way it handles files locations. You are always wondering what is actually happening when a file is saved as it lists processed files not by location, but by scanning session. It's a bit like managing a multi-k MP3 collection from iTunes... Quite annoying and almost impossible...

Now about the films. This scanner is able to scan films, B&W and negatives without too much problems, despite the fact that you must manually change the backlight plug-in device for every frame. By default the software crops the frame as it wishes, but you are able to disable this feature if you want borders scanned as well. Scan speed is correct up to 2400 dpi (about 1min 30s to 2 min). Above this resolution, it takes about 5 minutes at 4800 dpi frame and it becomes useless except for specific pictures. I have scanned several hundreds of B&W films (home brewed!) and after messing up at first, I managed to get good results. With the appropriate software such as Photoshop CS4 or CS5 you can save files with 48/16 bits color depth by TWAIN importing (beware CS4 64 bits does not allow this. You must use the provided 32 bits version for the TWAIN interface, another couple of hours lost to figure it out...). You're not able to use 48/16 bits color depth from the Canon software itself as it cannot handle these special files properly, but this is usually the case with most scanner makers. I believe you would probably get even better results with a more professional flatbed film scanner such as 8800f or Epson V500 as I always find that the pictures could be better resolved. But you also have a glass between the CCD and the film...
Another point of concern is the fact that you must calibrate this scanner quite regularly. I've found post in forums of users throwing out this scanner as they had horizontal lines when scanning films. This is normal and shows you must calibrate it. Overall from my experience, you must do so at every photo scanning session. It takes 3 minutes to do so, but you have to find where the functionality is hidden in the software. It took me 1 hour to find it. Thanks to the Canon developers... I am a very advanced user, and I believe that most users could not find the calibration functionality this easily... You have to switch the entire software to advanced mode (after you clicked scanning films), then go to the parameters menu, then you'll find in one of the tabs 2 tiny buttons for scanner glass and film calibrations. From there it is straightforward as it is all explained by pop-up messages. Another completely stupid ergonomics brought to you by Canon. Why to hide these absolutely indispensable buttons?
But my extra large concern and source of deep consternation is the total inability of this scanner to scan mounted slides. When you try to do so, although there are no reasons whatsoever why it couldn't technically do so, you get completely fuzzy images as the CCD captor is unable to focus the half height of the frame mount. I cannot understand what happened in Canon's mind when they gave their green light to the mass production of this device. Did they think that people do not have slides to scan in the 21st century? This is a proof of complete disrespect from Canon toward their photograph customers.

Overall, this scanner is nice for office tasks, but for films it should NOT be branded as a film scanner as it is misleading. It may scan a negative film from time to time, but do not expect to do more that this.

Pros
-Nice ergonomics, thin line, innovative structure
-Nice blend of scan quality, speed, ease of use and software for everyday office tasks
-Does not require a power supply (USB powered) Nice!!
-Cheap
-Ok to scan a film from time to time.

Cons
-CANNOT SCAN MOUNTED SLIDES!! This is more than annoying, it's REVOLTING!!
-Strange software ergonomics, maybe Ok if you have major brain damage, but otherwise requires a lot of search for basic functionalities, calibration in particular
-Requires regular calibration for films scanning (every session). It's Ok once you know how to do it.
-Impossible to clean the glass from below except if you know how to deal with plastic tabs. A fast remove structure would have been nice as it is necessary to clean the glass from below from time to time
-- Ok for normal office tasks, very limited for films, REVOLTING for slides

This scanner installed easily and works well on both my HP (Windows Vista) laptop and my MAC (Leopard). That's a first. I love that it's powered through the USB connection so it doesn't require another plug. It's light and easily moved because of the USB only connection. I even took it on the road with me. It's an outstanding value for the money, but for the money don't expect a high speed, beefy scanner. It feels flimsy and it's slow. But it works and it works easily. Like most cheaper products, I wonder about the durability and I've had it for only 5 weeks. I've used it primarily for documents and can attest to document scan quality. So far so good! -- Slow and Steady Gets the Job Done