April 30, 2007
More Monday Photos and Scanner Hatred
There are three new photos for today! ^_^
I recently invested in a new scanner to handle these photos and my other period scans. After looking at what was available in my local area (not usually the best plan, but I wanted it sooner rather than later), I ended up with a CanoScan LiDE 600F. The physical scanner design is awesome. The origin is set next to the cover hinges. There are only raised edges on three sides, so you can drape materials off the other edge. It's very thin and light. It runs totally on USB power and supports USB 2.0 so it's just a bit faster to transmit data.
Then I started up the included software. Yes Canon, I certainly don't want you to save anything to disk for me. I definitely don't want to see my scan results before I quit your scanning UI. I absolutely don't want things named in order and I'm sure you don't need to worry about running out of memory while I scan 70 pages at 300 dpi. I don't really need to set the bit depth of my image in bits! Vague feel good terms are just fine! Naturally I just love using your proprietary photo editing software that was conceived as the bastard child of notepad and paint somewhere on the slow boat from China. ARGH!!!!
The only reason I'm not returning the scanner right now is because VueScan supports it. On the down side, I had to lay out $40 for VueScan. On the up side, VueScan is a great piece of software. It does everything I wanted and more than I would have asked for. It never should have gotten to that though, because Canon should have provided me with software that would actually allow me to use their scanner in a real life situation. I'm not a teenager who wants to scan one or two pictures of my emo unicorn poetry illustrations. I'm an adult who wants to do bulk scanning with strong and useful tools. Canon did not make much of an attempt to meet my needs.
No matter how nice the physical scanner design is I would not recommend the CanoScan LiDE 600F to others unless all they are going to be doing is occasional, small bouts of scanning.
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