ScanGear CS

On my 9900F review I was very critical of Canon's ScanGear software. I felt it was too basic for a high end scanner. The 9950F uses a new version (10.3.0.0) which is very similar to the old one but there are sufficient differences to make this a better interface. There are just two modes, Simple mode and Advanced mode.

Simple mode

Simple Mode

In simple mode there is a workflow on the right hand side, you select the source from a choice of six presets; Photo(Color), Magazine(Color), Newspaper(B&W), Document(Grayscale), Negative Film(Color) and Positive Film(Color). Note the absence of Negative Film (B&W) in this mode, you can of course scan a B&W neg as a colour negative, but you will have to remove the sepia cast in your image editing application. Next you click on the Preview button to preview the document. Select a destination - Print 300dpi or Image Display 150dpi. I find this choice odd as the people who will use Simple mode are more likely to be printing via an inkjet printer, which only requires a resolution of 200 - 240 dpi. And for screen work the required dpi would only need to be 72 or 96 dpi - still I suppose there is room for error or cropping. The answer lies in the next setting, the output setting. If you choose Print 300 dpi then the Output size gives you various options from 6x4 to A4 or Letter size and you can add your own custom size to the list. Finally press the Perform Scan button.

I will return to film scanning in great detail later in the review, for the time being I am just going to deal with basic print scanning. As you can see from the above screen shot, the preview of a 6x4 print does not fill the entire screen in Simple mode. When you select a custom print size the selection bounding box will scale up or down proportionately.

Along the top edge are a series of buttons, the first one is for film scanning, which I will come back to later. The second button removes the active selection, the next button finds the boundaries of your print. The next three buttons are for flipping and rotating the preview. The next two buttons are for multiple scanning of film. Finally there is the information and help buttons. Multiple prints can be scanned by placing them on the platen and manually making a selection on each print, the scanner will then scan each selected area as a separate picture. The scans are executed on a single pass.

Two prints selected	Multi-Scan mode choices

A whole platen preview took 8 seconds and a scan of the 6x4 print took 11.29 seconds - this is a very fast scanner. The quality of the scan was very good, considering everything in this mode is automatic.

In conclusion, the Simple mode is far too basic for a scanner of this caliber, anyone who buys this will be demanding far more control on their scans that the simple mode can offer. Fortunately there is a very good advanced mode which I will look at in the morning.