Canon 9900F review

The Canon 9900F scanner

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Advanced Mode - this is the mode that enables you to access all the full features on the 9900F. On the left hand side is the Preview window, in the same space is the Preview, Zoom, Scan and Clear Preview buttons. Previews take about 9 seconds on a full Platen scan. If you have made an area selection then you can fill the page with your selected area by using the Zoom button. The Scan button performs the scan and the Clear Preview clears the screen. Above the preview window there is the same basic toolbar as in the Simple Mode, this can be a floating palette, docked to middle or left side.

ScanGear CS in Advanced Mode

On the right hand side there are three tabs: Main, Settings and Colour. The Main tab has the following options;
Select Source; the choices are Platen, Color Nega film, Color Posi film, BW Nega film and BW Posi film.
Color Mode; Color, Black and White, Greyscale and Text Enhanced. When the B&W is selected the last tab changes to Halftone and disappears when Text Enhanced is selected.
Resolution; for document scanning the resolution the choices are 50, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600 but you can type in any figure you like. When the source is set to film then the 3200 also becomes available.
Paper size; this is an odd one, there are a few sizes that I couldn't quite work out L Portrait, LL Portrait, L Landscape LL Landscape, Business card. I tried scanning with each of these settings and I still couldn't make head or tail of it. I will stick with full platen scans, perhaps it will become clearer as the review progresses.
Multi Crop; this automatically crops the image borders, but also disables the Colour tab. This seems to assume that if you need your images to be cropped automatically then you know how to colour correct an image. You can't select a resolution above 800 dpi when the Multi crop is active.
Selection; this gives a readout of how big your selected area is ( inches, centimetres or pixels). Below is a maintain proportions button.
Print Size; by default this is set to 100% but you can increase or decrease the final print size by either typing in the required size or by altering the percentage scale.

The Settings tab has the following options;
Filter Processing; Descreen is either on or off. I would have expected more user control on this. The Unsharp Mask has the same minimal control, in fact it is not an unsharp mask at all, it just sharpens the outline of your image. The Reduce Dust and Scratches, Fading correction and Grain correction have three options each - Soft, Normal and Hard.
Quality; this setting is for film scanning which I will deal with in great detail later.
Auto Exposure; also for film scanning.

There is also a Preferences button, use this for colour management and various options such as Lamp Off after xx minutes, Preview settings, Enable 48 bit scanning, etc

The colour management options

The final Colour tab has all the tools for correcting brightness, contrast, gamma, histogram and curves. Any settings you make can be saved and reloaded for re-use.


Main tab	Settings tab	Color tab

I have worked my way through the entire ScanGear software and have come to the conclusion that Simple Mode is best suited to entry level scanners and Advanced Mode is far too basic for a top of the range scanner. I can't stress enough how important good Scanning software is, it can make the difference between a good scan and a great scan. Canon could drop some of the bundled software and include a more sophisticated scanning package instead.

In Advanced mode the preview took 9 seconds and a 10 x 8 scan took 19 seconds producing a 21.3mb file. I should point out that when the scanner hasn't been used for a period of time, (the lamp is turned off after 12 minutes by default, but can be changed) it takes over 1 minute for the lamp to readjust itself before you can continue using the scanner.