Apple Reviews

Being an amatuer photographer, I wanted a scanner that could scan slides and negatives. The 5000F is a flatbed scanner so it can also scan documents which makes a very versitile and useful scanner. Usually flatbed scanners do NOT make good film and slide scanners; the 5000F is an exception. It's actually based on a rather decent CCD technology rather than the cheaper CIS chip (most flatbeds), which is the reason for the very good film/slide scanning performance. It has a special back-lit slot in the cover for slides and negatives. You can scan up to 3 negs or 2 slides at once. It also has an IR dust and scratch removal sensor that works fairly well (but not on scratches). The quality is very very good but the scans are quite slow, even with a USB-2 connection. You must remove a white backing board, insert the negs or slides in provided carriers, and position the carriers in the scanner. The graphics software, Archsoft PhotoStudio, is quite adequate but not nearly on the same level as Adobe Photoshop. There's MUCH additional software for creating photo albums, photo databases, OCR, etc.. Installation is very easy. It took me 20 minutes to install and start scanning after a bad day at work! The quality of the scans is excellent, the scanning software is very easy to use, the software package is quite comprehensive, scanning negs and slides requires some fumbling, and the scans are slow (but I've seen slower). The quality of the slide/negative scans is the MOST important feature to me and the 5000F delivers. **For the money**, I am VERY happy with the package overall.

I bought this scanner because of the Canon name. My last scanner was a Canon, as is my printer. Both have performed flawlessly. I chose this particular model because of the USB interface so I could use it with both my Mac and my Hewlett Packard IBM Clone, and because it has an attachment to scan negatives.
As a basic scanner, it's great. Good color. Good sharpness. Though, it's a somewhat larger than you might expect based on the pictures. But don't be misteken -- this is not a professional film scanner. It's an OK mid-range consumer product. Colors tend to be off slightly when scanning negatives using the "dust and scratch" mode. Also, the "dust and scratch" mode is not available in resolutions over 600 dpi. I get the sense that otherwise, this is a powerful piece of hardware. The problem is that the software for it is horrible. The Mac and Windows versions are identical, and neither is really up to the task at hand. They are poorly laid out with no clear-cut way to perform simple tasks. If you're scanning into something like Photoshop, it can control the scanner through the TWAIN driver. But if you just want to make a quickie black-and-white scan of a piece paper to fax to someone, it's too much of a hassle. Again, hardware quality is great. But the software leaves a lot to be desired.

You can still get this scanner new at eBay or at some camera places. I got it solely because I wanted a film scanner, but could not afford a "real" one. Flatbed scanners are considered inferior for such things. Well, if this scanner is making inferior scans of negatives or slides, I can't tell! I think they are wonderful. It even has the FARE system, which is usually found on more expensive models. The software bundle has loads of photo software, as well as an OCR program. I have used the OCR program once...there were too many words it couldn't read...and I could have typed up the article faster than proofreading the mistakes.But I have not read up on everything yet, mainly because there is no printed manual, only a Quick Start Guide. But at least the QSG tells you more than most. It's still confusing at times, though. Even things I've done before can be confusing to repeat. It's just not the easiest software on the face of the Earth.But as I said, it scans negatives and slides beautifully, as well as photos. It does far better with photos than my HP All-In-One. It should, however, since it is a photo/film scanner.And it's a nice priced one at that!

Bad Points - Printer is noisy and often feeds more than one sheet at a time. Long warm up time. Does not feed easily when only a few sheets are left in the sheet feeder. Print quality is so-so but acceptable. I don't think it is made any longer by Canon.
Good Points - The printer was cheap when I bought it. It has individual ink tanks. There are various quality levels of printing.

i've had my canon bjc-6000 for three years now. as of today, it's finally crapped out on me. i have tried everything to fix it (performed all the maintenance, cleaning, etc.) and nothing. so, i've opted to buy a canon i850, which i've heard good things about.

so, for the three years it DID work, here's my thoughts:

PROS: individual ink tanks! for ANYONE who does even a marginal amount of printing, you should invest in a printer with ind. ink tanks - it's just common sense. i can't understand why other printer companies haven't followed suit on this kind of thing. i definately got my money's worth out of the 6000. i have printed hundreds of photos that looked pretty darn good, even without the optional photo ink cartridges. keep in mind, i've had nothing to compare them to. :) it has a lot of options to print your documents/photos, etc., so for the advanced user, or just a regular user, interface is pretty easy to use.

CONS: color photo printing in highest resolution mode takes FOREVER; about 8 mins to print a page with two 4x6 prints on it. so, it's not the fastest printer, by any means. and, it's noisy, too. it cleans the print heads all the time, and while printing, actually shakes the monitor and desk hutch it's sitting on. yowza! for general purpose printing, i would recommend using good paper and something other than the "auto" setting.

overall, it's been a great printer, but it's time to move on to newer and better technology! my biggest piece of advice to anyone buying a printer: get one with individual ink tanks! it's just common sense!

I bought the BJC 6000 in mid of 1999 ... I am happy I invested so much money on it. It work very well. With the photo ink and top photo paper, I can have close to real prints. All the limitation is the image itself. The money I spent on inks has exceed the [amount] for the printer itself.

The interface was in parallel, so some of my observation may not apply for USB version. The first page is always fast, but the next one will have to wait, and wait (For what?). That is the only cons I found and complain about. The speed is kind of slow at top quality, hey, that is acceptable. :)

The individual ink is a big plus. I found myself changing yellow more frequently then the other two.

Finally, the i850 seems to use the same inks as the BJC6000, which means i850 can't exceed the quality on the horizon direction.

On the go, I frequently need to print out documents, be it invoices, reciepts, e-mails, etc etc so I decided to purchase this product. Words cannot describe my feelings toward it, I use it soo much with the laptops I don't know how I lived without one before. Installation on Windows 2k, and ME was flawless, both using the Fast IrDA.

The printer is just the perfect size to slide in to my briefcase, and adds little weight. It's battery operation is really what caught my eye, it says you can print about 100 pages with a full charge, but I think its a bit less than that. However, the battery takes little time to charge.

I was not aware it would come with as much ink as it did, came with 2 color cartidges, 1 black (small), and 1 black (large), as well as two trays that they are held in. The Fast IrDA is such a fabulous thing, wireless printing all the way. I decided to purchase a USB cable, its much easier some times using the cable then the IrDA (Infared) port. The quality of the documents is fantastic, matching (and beating!) my desktop printers at home. The speed is good, considering this is a portable printer. The only real drawback is that it is a single sheet feed printer, unless you buy the paper loader, which I will surely do! This is THE BEST portable printer I've found on the market, it is well worth the money.

This is a small update, I've been using the printer for about 5 months now, and everything has gone smoothly. I purchased the auto-sheet feeder from Canon (directly, from their web site) and it performs just like a normal desktop printer would! I'm still loving it.

I needed a printer to go with my Notebook and this one filled the bill. It isn't cheap but you seem to get what you pay for. When at home, adding the Auto Sheet Feeder makes it as convenient as a stationary printer but with a smaller footprint. Highly recommend this one for the Notebook users.

I JUST BOUGHT THIS PRINTER FOR MY LAPTOP.
IT WAS VERY EASY TO INSTALL AND EASY TO WORK WITH. THE PRINTING IS GREAT, AND QUICK FOR A BUBBLE JET. THE COLOR IS VERY GOOD.

This scanner has probably good hardware but you can expect big problems with software. The colors of photos scanned from negative film depend on the other shots on the same strip. Unfortunately even if you tell the scanner not to use color correction it does it anyway. Scanning 20+ negs with 3200dpi takes more than 5 hours. It was more or less acceptable for me if I could expect normal result. Unfortunately it happens often that after hours of waiting you have to delete pictures with heavy blue cast and put strips into the scanner in another order and hope that it will work (sometimes it helps).

I have asked from Canon customer care if there is another software or a way to configure this one somehow. They answered that I have to ask from Adobe. :-)

I assumed that, having a Firewire interface, this scanner would have really good Mac OS X support. Boy was I wrong. The CD came with no obvious installer, but a bunch of unintuitively named installers deep inside folders with no clues about the order of installation. I was able to download better installers from Canon's web site, but even so, the installation was painful. The installer would actually install another installer and then launch Internet Explorer to give you instructions on what to do next. There were several pieces of software to install, each one using this Byzantine method. At least the instructions in IE were clear.

The scanner driver is quite bad. The layout of the interface is poor (not to mention ugly) and the software sucks up all available CPU power when idle (strangely, CPU power goes down to 5 or 10% during scanning). Also, the installers load daemons that watch for button presses on the front of scanner. These suck up 5 or 10% of the CPU when the scanner is disconnected and output error messages continually to the system log files (they to grow to hundreds of megabytes and it becomes very difficult to find anything useful in them.)

Now, scanner software has a reputation for being bad and I just assumed that if Canon's were terrible I would buy the fantastic VueScan shareware program. I should have done my homework: Canon uses a proprietary communication protocol with this scanner, so it will only work with THEIR awful software. I recommend checking carefully and only buying TWAIN scanners, unless you KNOW the software that the scanner comes with is good.

Finally, I keep having a problem where, in the middle of a scan, the driver tells me that it has lost communication with the scanner and to check the cable. Once this happens, only a reboot will restore communication. Disconnecting the scanner, power cycling it, changing the cable, etc have no effect.

I sent tech support queries to Canon several times about these problems and never received a response.

On the hardware side, the negative scanner insert is pretty flimsy (though it hasn't broken yet) and does not hold the negatives flat. The lid does not quite close all the way. I usually have to put a small book on it to get it flush with the glass.

The scans that I have made are quite nice. But the pain associated with them has meant I have not used the scanner as much as I intended and have spent far too much time making those few scans.

I bought this unit to scan old b/w negatives & pictures. I had to increase my RAM from 128M to 512M and upgrade my USB to 2.0. Once I did that, things worked better. However, I still couldn't save a bmp file directly without it crashing. After speaking with Canon tech support--which was far more helpful on the scanner side of the house than their copier side--I found that the ArcSoft software had some issues. I began to use the included Adobe Photoshop Elements program exclusively and, what a difference! The truly extraordinary ability of this program to take a faded, discolored photo and, via auto color correction, restore it to vibrant, rich colors is astonishing! Even b/w pictures can be easily enhanced with the auto contrast feature. Have been able to scan old box camera negatives (120, 620, 116 & 616 formats) using the carrier, to my great delight. One caveat, the large format carrier for negatives is not as robust as the 35mm negative carrier. My normal scans of positives is at 400 or 800 dpi. It's impressive that a photo the size of a quarter can be effectively enlarged with great integrity. I have pulled out subtle details in photos that had escaped my notice even with the aid of a conventional magnifying glass. If you scan your photos at a minimum of 400 dpi you'll be amazed at how much they can be enlarged with little to no visible pixelation. I haven't tried batch scanning. None of my local retailers carried this unit. As one explained to me, the general buying public tends to go for the cheapest, low resolution scanners. Am so glad I went for this more powerful, utilitarian unit. Its versatility to work with negatives from 35mm to large format 4x5, as well as 35mm slides, and photos or documents makes it a great choice. The Canon program Scangear is easy to use and even a novice can quickly master it in short order.

I bought this scanner because the image ratings were great. What I got was a scanner that spends more time warming up and thinking than scanning. This has caused a 4 fold increase in my scan times. As they say, time is money! Also, the software tools that come with have a poor, non-standard interface that required much head scratching. I just returned the scanner!

I bought this scanner 2 days ago in Phoenix and returned it today. Software takes almost 20 min. to install, is very confusing to use ( compared to a Visioneer 7300 which I have) there is no power switch meaning that the scanner is always on. But the warm up time is long and the scan is slooow and noisy. Cost was $199.

I was looking for a high image quality FAST flat bed scanner and found 2 within my budget both MSRP$199, Canon 8000F and Epson 3170 so I bought 2 to compare. Both exhibit excellent image and text quality, both include negative/slide adapter and both have great software bundle.
However, 8000F comes with Photoshop Element 1.0 where as Epson 3170 comes with Element 2.0 which is $50 value by itself.
The slow scan speed of this 8000F makes this unsuitable for my need. Preview takes 7 second as oppose to 4 sec advertised speed. Scanning color photo full bed at 300dpi takes 43 sec, 96dpi takes 23 sec. The canon website says this is a fast scanner but my test proves otherwise. With the same PC setup for Epson 3170, preview takes only 4 sec, 300dpi color photo full bed takes 23 sec, and 96dpi takes 9.3 sec.
8000F is also noisier than the 3170. Another minor problem is 8000F does not have a power switch like the Epson.
One good thing about the 8000F is the copy to printer function works and OCR is a tiny bit more accurate than 3170.
Canon makes great printer which I also own but their scanner is a disappointment
I would not recommend user to buy this scanner.

this is one of the best products i have ever come across for real time picture ditortion