If I had reviewed this scanner right after I purchased, I might have given it five stars. Luckily for you reading this, I waited long enough to discover all of its flaws. Now that Minolta has released a new 5400 dpi scanner that has Digital ICE and hardware based grain reduction, I can’t possibly recommend the Canoscan FS4000US.

If you are reading this review, you are probably aware that the FS4000US is designed for the specific purpose of scanning 35mm film. It can also scan APS film, a feature I suspect that few owners take advantage of. The person serious enough about photography to buy this scanner isn’t going to use APS film.

The positive thing about this scanner is that it scans at 4000 dpi, and creates sharp scans (possibly too sharp if it’s using sharpening algorithm and enhancing the grain because of that). It also has good dynamic range. People have said that it has a lot of noise in shadow areas, but I have not really found this to be the case if you scan at 42 bits. The 24 bit scans come out bad, I don’t recommend that you scan at 24 bits.

The Canoscan comes with three trays. One holds fours slides, one holds a strip of up to six negatives, and the last is used for APS film. It looks like a lot of effort went into designing the APS holder, but I’ve never used it.

The tray for slides is convenient, because you can select four slides you want to scan, and the scanning software will scan all four at once while you are doing something else. Scanning negatives is less convenient, because they come in the order you shot the film.

I don’t think the negative tray was designed as well as it could have been. I think a sturdier tray with a different design could hold the film flatter. The negative tray feels slightly loose, and I don’t think it’s locking in the negatives as tightly as possible. If the negative is not completely flat, you get some areas that are out of focus. There should have at least been a bar between every negative, and not every two negatives as the tray has been designed.

This scanner is extremely slow. Everything about is slow. When you first attempt to bring up the scanning software (through a TWAIN compliant photo editing program like Photoshop), there is a long delay while the scanner is “calibrating”. What is it calibrating for such a long time? Then when you do a thumbnail scan there is another long delay while it makes noises and moves the tray around. And how slow is the scan itself? Very very slow. This is not the scanner to use if you have a lot of film to scan.

The scanner software from Canon seems to work pretty well. Some people say they use third party scanner software, but I haven’t figured out what the purpose of that would be. I don’t use any of the image correcting functions in the scanner software, it’s easier to do that in Photoshop.

My biggest complaint about the scanning software is that it doesn't let you adjust the exposure in useful stops. If you're scanning negatives, setting the exposure to +1 will make your scan underexposed and useless, and -1 you get a scan where the highlights are lost. Canon should have allowed you to adjust the exposure in smaller increments.

If you are going to be using any 4000 dpi scanner, you will need a LOT of memory in your computer. 256MB RAM doesn’t cut it. I have 768MB in my system, and this seems to work very well.

My biggest complaint with this scanner is with FARE, Canon’s infrared dust and scratch removal system. It doesn’t work very well. When it does work, it does remove some scratches and dust. But it misses a lot of the dust, and seems ineffective against most scratches. But half the time it doesn’t even work. FARE has two settings, Standard, and Strong. Usually, when I use the Strong setting, I get strange black spots and artifacts and other weirdness all over the scan, which makes the scan unusable. Sometimes, you can’t even get the Standard FARE to work properly. Because each scan takes such a long time to scan, it’s very annoying to have to scan over again because FARE messed up the scan.

It is said that the competing product, Digital ICE, is effective against the “pepper grain” seen on Fuji slide film. The Canon FARE is completely ineffective against the Fuji pepper grain, so this is not the scanner to buy if you shoot a lot of Fuji slide film such as Provia 100F.

Sometimes I get a scan with a horizontal dark band running across the image. I don't think this has anything to do with FARE, it's just another one of the weird things this scanner does to annoy me. If I turn the scanner off and on, and re-scan, then the band goes away. Once again, with this scanner being so slow, having to re-scan is highly annoying.

My overall conclusion is that the slow speed, poorly implemented FARE dust and scratch removal, and the other drawbacks I mentioned in my review, make me not recommend this scanner. I would buy the Minolta scanner instead if I were buying a scanner today.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 600

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