Canon 1306B002 CanoScan 4400F Color Image Scanner

I have been toting around a shoebox of my dad's slides since he passed away. There are about 500 Kodachrome transparencies of family vacations, army photos, and all us kids at Easter and Christmas. Even without cleaning the slides, I am completely amazed at how good these are coming out! I was only able to see these in one of those little slide boxes you held up to the light--until today. I'm finding great early photos of my mom from the 40s wearing a fantastic print dress and big curls in her hair! So far I'm extremely pleased with how these are coming out!!!The scanner is VERY easy to set up. I have an iMac running Leopard. I followed the quick-start guide, popped in the cd, clicky click click, plug it in, did a quick test with a cartoon, and worked like a charm. I mainly purchased it for scanning this bunch of old slides. It comes with a little plastic tray (for lack of a better term) to put 4 slides in. This tray is conveniently hidden behind a white plastic sheet in the lid of the scanner. This tray feels kinda flimsy, so I'm being very careful with it--that is my only concern so far.With the $99 price, there is no great software for correcting the dust and fuzz. You can however, play a little bit with the image settings. For most of what I have scanned so far, I have only set the Backlight Correction setting to Low or Medium; and you can do this on a slide by slide basis or do them all on one setting. This has made some of the older dark photos look fantastic. I have also used the Rotate to turn the photo right way up or flip it over.I'm really impressed with the quality and ease-of-use so far. My intention was just to get these into a digital format before they turn to dust, not do magic with them just yet. Like the Technicolor Ektachrome slides are red-red, and I'd like to eventually fix the worthwhile ones of those, as well as do the repair and hair removal needed on a bunch. Overall first impression is this is a great value, and the quality is better than expected overall. If you need to do a LOT of correcting of your slides/film/photos, you may want to jump up a few levels to one with a more advanced Photo-shop-like software to do this all at once.Update 1/27/08--I was in such a hurry to get slides digitized when I started using this scanner... Just wanted to pass on what I learned so far. I'm pretty impressed with the software that does come with it. At first pass it didn't seem all that impressive and I thought I was lucky that the slides scanned looked as good as they did! After taking more time--and slowing down to see what some of the other options really did in the panel after you have 'previewed' a batch--omg it does wonders!!! The Ektachromes that are way red, well now they look much more normal. I have gone back and rescanned a bunch of slides from the beginning mad rush I was in, and I have to tell you that they look even more incredible than before. A pretty good scan of a slide of my Mom dated May 1946 is brighter, skin color more natural... I'm very pleased with how this product is working, can you tell?!Another crumb of advice, get a good quality photo brush to get the dust and crumbs off the slides--I'm surprised how much can get removed with the soft natural bristles. I also got a photographic emulsion cleaner and pads for some of the tough spots. Whatever is in that bottle has removed quite a few of those black spots that always show up on someone's forehead!And I see the price dropped on this... I paid $99 and thought it was a good deal! Good luck!

I've had it for years, from Windows XP through 7 to 10. It's possible that with new drivers and software (maybe downloadable from Canon?) the user interface might have improved a bit. Out of the box (ages ago) it was a pain: setting target directory, not overwriting previous scans, etc. It does work, but at this price I judge certainly not worth the $$.BTW, what on earth is "warmth" in an Amazon review? Meaningless? I certainly wouldn't rate this machine cool.

This scanner worked flawlessly out of the box with my new Intel Powerbook. It took only a couple of minutes to unpack it, take off the tape, unlock the transport lock on the bottom of the unit, polish the glass surface, plug in the USB cable to the computer and attach the power outlet.Installing the software was a simple insert the CD and respond to the screen prompts.Hint: After the software is installed and you run it the first time you will be asked at the bottom of the scan screen to identify (link) it with an "external program" - I would advice skipping the PhotoArc software installed by the CD and "link it" to your iPhoto application. Now when you make a scan it will be instantly installed in your iPhoto library. You can easily use the iPhoto tools to crop, clean, and organizae your photos.I have been using this with an OSX genealogy program (Reunion 9.03 and highly recommended).One limitation is that the negatives are for 35 mm only. If you have a lot of large negatives you will have to look at other options. However, the 35 mm negatives works alright but it is almost faster to scan just the photos.I have owned more expensive scanners but for $90 )including a free Amazon shipping promotion) makes this an excellent purchase.

I bought this scanner to convert old family photos to images. It does a really nice job for an under $100 product. In particular the automatic restoring of faded color and B/W photos is a huge time saver for me. Many of y old photos are faded, and this scanner restores color and contrast without any work on my part. It also crops the scan area for me, so all I have to do it load the photo and click twice (preview and scan). The only negative I noted, is that the image restoration is either on or off. The preview mode lets me see the effect of the image restoration, and turn it on of off for the image capture scan. On a few photos, I noted that turning the image restoration on goes too far... it saturates the color too much or increases the contrast too much for the photo. In these cases, I have to capture without restoration, and use Photoshop Elements to tune the image manually. It would have been great if Canon had provided a slider for the image restoration, so that I could apply as much as I needed for a photo... For most of my scans, this has not been a problem. I scanned a few new photos "as is", and 98% of my old photos with restoration, and without any further manual tuning in Elements. If you want to digitize your shoe box of photos, this is an inexpensive answer.