Canon's CanoScan FS4000

Version 1.2, Page 6, ©2001 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved

Build Quality and Handling

The scanner itself looks very well made, but I am less excited about the plastic film holders. They look and feel somewhat fragile, being made of what appears to be the same brittle sort of plastic (styrene?) I remember from the model airplane kits of my childhood. It is probably fortunate that Canon sells them separately. For home use by an adult there is probably little to worry about; production environments are what give me pause. Still, if using plastic instead of metal is one of the cost savings that brings the FS4000 in at almost half the price of the competition, one can buy several spare neg and transparency holders and still be laughing.

The FS4000 comes with a very professional-looking APS attachment into which one slips an APS canister. This amounts to a 40 frame roll feeder.

While the FS4000's film holders are a giant's step up from the film handling of the PhotoSmart S20, there is still room for improvement. The channel in the neg holder is perhaps half a millimeter wider than 35 mm film. This play is undoubtedly necessary during film loading to ensure lateral film flatness. However, once the top half of the holder is clamped down, the window over each frame is precisely the same width as the exposed portion of a film frame. In combination with the lateral play, you are left having to adjust each strip of film just so to avoid both losing a fraction of the frame and/or having the film at a slight angle. This is not a major downcheck, just a minor irritant. The mounted transparency holder, on the other hand, couldn't be friendlier.

Once the scanner has taken possession of the film holder it employs a marvelous two-stage stepper motor arrangement to move the holder rapidly for gross adjustments then extremely slowly and finely for the final scan. The sounds issuing forth are unusual and entertaining but not loud or annoying.

Norman Koren reports a problem with film holder ejection that I do not have and that we attribute to his having gotten version 1.0.0 software with his early-release unit.

FARE

As you can from the on-line samples in the Imaging-Resource review, FARE is exactly what dust-removal should be. It removes all dust without softening the image in the process. It does not remove scratches, but I consider retouching the occasional scratch to be small payment for perfect dust control.

Software

So far as I know, all major Windows-based image editing applications provide the option of using the TWAIN_32. The FS4000, however, is the first scanner I've heard of that provides only TWAIN support and not a separate scanning front end application. Superficially, this would seem to make sense - why put resources into two software projects if only one is needed to get the job done. Canon even provide the by-no-means-trivial Adobe Photoshop LE image editing application for anyone who doesn't already own one.

As Taylor Hively rightly notes, the Achilles' heel of this approach is batch processing. There is no option for FilmGet (the TWAIN front end) to save scan files to disk, consequently you can only scan as many frames in one batch as you have RAM to hold. No problem for a 500 or 1000 ppi scan, but can be an issue at the higher resolutions.

The shareware program Vuescan now supports the FS4000 and by-passes this problem. Vuescan also solves another significant FilmGet shortcoming: 8-bit image processing. See Norman Koren's review for a clever bit of sleuthing on this.

Having gotten the niggles out of the way, FilmGet is reasonably easy to learn and to use. FilmGet is also completely stable, at least on my system, which is apparently more than some of the competition can say.