ScanGear control

The scanning software is your control panel, from here you decide how your image is going to look when it is sent to your image editing application, so unless you are heavily into colour management and creating custom profiles, this is a crucial stage. Although ScanGear has undergone a few tweaks since the 9900F version, it is still very basic when compared to other scanning interfaces I have seen. This would not put me off from deciding whether or not to buy this scanner, at the end of the day it has to be a combination of good optics and software, Canon have had probably more experience than most when it comes to optical performance. I have high hopes for this scanner, I hope I am not going to be disappointed later in the review.

6x4 print preview and zoomed in

Having dug through my pile of old family snaps to try and find some colour prints to scan, I can't help thinking how far we have come in a very short time. The prints I have made by various labs - pro and high street are on the whole awful. I would not be giving a rave review on the printer that created these. If anyone has any doubts about wet chemistry v digital printing then just have a look at the high quality you can achieve with a humble inkjet printer. Sorry I am deviating from the review.

The controls

	Select source; Platen, Colour negative film, Colour positive film, Monochrome negative film, Monochrome positive film. Define paper size; inches, centimeters or pixels. The aspect can be locked. The multi crop is for scanning in several areas of a print.
	Color mode has four options; Color, Black and White, Greyscale and Text enhanced. The output resolution can be up to 1200dpi for print scanning (4800 for film). The output size has many predefined sizes, or you can define your own. The bottom Data size indicates the file size you are about to create.
	The Auto tone does a quick colour correction for you. Unsharp Mask has two options, On & Off - keep it off and use the USM in Photoshop. Descreen also has two options. I would have expected far more control than this for a top of the range scanner. The next four settings have four options; None, Low, Medium and High. These all worked reasonably well but with such basic adjustments you would get better results in an imaging application.
	The five buttons each open up a small palette. Details are given below.

The adjustment palettes

1.	2.
3.	4.
5.

1. The first palette, Brightness and Contrast also displays a curve, you can't alter the curve directly from here, only the two sliders.

2. The second palette is for adjusting the Gamma, this is set to 2.20 for Windows and 1.8 for Mac.

3. The Histogram palette is similar to the Level command in Photoshop, move the sliders to lighten or darken areas of the image. You can also adjust the colour via each of the RGB channels. Not the easiest way to make an adjustment. There is a Gray Balance eyedropper, which when clicked on a white, grey or black will shift any colour cast to neutral - a handy tool.

4. The tone curve palette will allow you to drag the curves up and down, again colour corrections are made by selecting a channel and applying a curve adjustment.

5. The final review gives you an overview of what has been done, move the eyedropper over the preview window and you can observe the shifts that have been made. There is also an option to save your combined settings or load a previous setting.

Although at first sight I thought Canon hade made some in-roads with their ScanGear software, looking at it in more detail has proved me wrong. The controls are too basic for such a well specified scanner. I would have liked to seen more colour adjustment controls, sliders that let you adjust Cyan/Red, Magenta/Green, Yellow/Blue, Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Of course all these can be applied in Photoshop or other application, but having them at the scanning stage would be an added bonus.

I will publish the first scans on Sunday, I need to do some more tinkering first.