[sane-devel] Canon 9000f MKII -- or other comparable scanner?

[Roger]

> On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 03:31:57PM +0100, James Tappin wrote:
>   Hi everyone.
>   **** I'm looking to upgrade my scanner from an Epson Perfection 1660, and
>   based on: listed support on the sane website, specs and price; the best
>   bet looks to be the Canon 9000f MkII.
>
>   Does anybody here have any real hands-on experience with that scanner, in
>   particular with film scanning (one of the reasons for the upgrade is the
>   poor performance of the Epson scanning film, and its complete lack of
>   medium format film support).
>
>   Alternatively, I'd welcome suggestions of alternatives (the main Epson
>   competitors are listed as unsupported) -- the main requirements are:
>   1) Supported by sane
>   2) Film scanning, including medium format.
>
>   James Tappin

I think you're right on the spot with selecting a Canon 9000f MkII versus Epson 
product.  Purchased a MK I 5-10 years ago for the parents for Christmas, and 
they love it.  (Purchased based on completed open source Linux drivers.)  I 
also later purchased the MK II a year or so ago.

I've read many reviews, before and after my purchase and am still well 
satisfied with my purchase.

The Canon 9000f MkI & MkII have completed driver support using Sane.  Infrared 
scanning also works, but still requires stitching algorithm coding for 
implementing the IR scans for photo negatives.

For photo negative scanning, I just purchased VueScan as I've been really tight 
on time for the past (almost) decade now.  There's a trick to "locking in the 
base negative color" within Vuescan for photo negatives, for which I do not 
think is currently (as of yet) coded into XSane.  (From memory, there is 
partial implementation for finding the base color mask, but it's not as 
consistent and as easy as VueScan.)

Personally, I cannot stand using binary only drivers and binary only front-ends 
such HP's HPLIP and likely Epson's IScan.  HP's HPLIP used to break on every 
upgrade for the past five or more years, due to their binary scanner driver.  
And debugging HPLIP was a nightmare, not to also mention HPLIP seemed like just 
a hunk of Python.  (I'd have less of a problem debugging C or Bash, maybe even 
Assembly!)  VueScan seems to be an exception, as VueScan doesn't install a mess 
of files all over the hard drive, and it's pretty easy to use like XSane except 
for the learning curve concerning getting repetitive perfect (negative) scans.

I've yet to spend additional money on the glass negative holders, and ithe 
consensus seems to be just to use the default negative holder unless you 
absolutely need to.

I don't know why some people are buying Epson scanners, when this Canon 9000f 
MkII product is available on the market.  Think it's because people readily get 
sucked into the proprietary ICE technology for scanning photo negatives, when 
there's nothing really special about the infrared scanning and VueScan 
implements something similar, and better in VueScan's author's opinion.  Using 
ICE or Infrared filtering, the scanner merrily performs an additional infrared 
scan.  Once completed, the two scans (or layers) are merrily layered on top of 
each other after using some software algorithms for detecting dust/scratches 
and inverting colors.  Also, some say the ICE is useless, unless you're 
purchasing a product within the $1,000 range; but you still have VueScan's 
infrared method option.

If you understand how closed source drivers become deprecated leaving you 
nothing but a door stop, think you cannot go wrong with this Canon product.  If 
you're looking for accuracy and detail examples, probably best to use one of 
the digital photography reviews, but some seem to have bias for the proprietary 
software.  I also noticed inconsistent testing between the Epson and Canon 
models.  And even if there is some lacking with the Canon, I'm still very 
satisfied with my scans.

--
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/