The Canon 9900F scanner

Page 4.

The 9900F in use.

The platen area on the 9900F will accommodate a maximum document size of 216 x 297 mm (8.5 x 11.7 in) or A4/Letter, more than adequate for most photographs. Pictures should be placed into the top right hand corner of the platen, there are markings on the top and side edges for B5, A4 and Letter. I am not sure why these markings have been included, they don't serve any practical purpose. I would rather have ruler markings, that would at least let me align documents to a given distance. I make it a policy never to place pictures on any edge, as most scanners give their best performance in the centre area "sweet spot", fortunately the area for film scanning falls into this area.

Documents are aligned to the right edge	Film occupies the central "Sweet Spot"
The effect of scanning the same test chart in the centre (L) and at the edge (R), note the loss of contrast

Although I have included a small section of a test target, I will not be testing for resolution numbers, there are plenty of sources for those types of tests on the net. I will be testing for visual appearance of pictures, colours and sharpness. For film scanning I will compare the scans with those obtained from dedicated film scanners.

Paper scans.

Flatbed scanners excel in reproducing flat artwork, whether it's copying a document or photograph the flatbed is the tool. Scanning in a photograph for this review would not prove a lot, unless you could physically compare it to the original. I have a reference print and original digital file supplied as part of the Colour Confidence suite. I will do a scan without any adjustments, with Auto and a scan with my own adjustments. The reference chart itself is a tightly controlled print and should be 95% accurate to the original file.

The Colour Confidence reference File

Straight scan with no adjustments

Scan using Auto Tone setting

Using the Histogram and eye dropper in ScanGear

Although the scan with no adjustments looks a very flat it does contain a lot of information, you can tweak the scan in Photoshop or other application which should only take a few seconds. The second scan is with the scanner set to Auto Tone, this produced a scan with a magenta bias, the cast may change according to image type. The last scan was achieved by using the Histogram function in the Colour tab. The settings data can be saved to hard disk and reloaded for use on future images. A good practice would be to scan a grey patch, sample the value and save this to disk. One annoying thing about making corrections in ScanGear, is if you tweak the selection then all the settings you have just made have the Auto tone applied, thereby canceling out all your efforts. To get around this you have to go into preferences, Color settings tab and uncheck the "Always perform the auto tone" box.

With user intervention, the final scan displays a good range of tones, with good detail in both the shadow and highlight areas. Colours are bright and closely match the reference print.

Where flatbeds really shine is in scanning old family photographs, here is a sample of the Oliver family using different settings. The original is quite badly faded and has a milky film over the darker areas. The Auto Apply setting boosted the shadow areas, the Greyscale scan gives the picture quite a lift and finally a sepia tone in Photoshop gives the scan a true quality feel. The point being made here is that as long as the scanner can capture all the detail you can edit it in your imaging application afterwards. The 9900F does capture all the detail.

No Adjustments	Set to Auto Apply
Greyscale scan	Greyscale with sepia effect (in Photoshop)

I should mention that the lid (FAU) has a nice sprung feel, the lid supports itself down to about 45' after that the lid gently lowers itself. Most scanners have a habit of letting their lids crash down onto the scanner platen and on your valuable pictures.

As a footnote to this page, I created a profile for this scanner using Monaco EZ Color 2 and set the profile in the preferences. This method produced excellent results as can be seen below. The 9900F is capable of producing outstanding results, but is let down by basic scanning software.

original digital file	scan using my custom profile
I set the custom profile as the source and let the profile sort out the colours

© Vincent Oliver 2003 www.photo-i.co.uk
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