I recently decided to digitise all my old rolls of film. At first, I was planning on saving up and having the photo lab scan them onto CD. However, after some number crunching, this was going to work out very expensive. The challenge now was to find an affordable SOHO solution - a road I've been down in the past with less than desirable results.

Enter the Canon CanoScan 8800F. A consumer scanner with an optical resolution of up to 4800 x 9600 dpi. It's also not too bad on the budget with a street price of around $280 (slightly cheaper online).

The scanner comes nicely packed in a smallish carry box:




Included in the box was:
* Scanner
* Power adapter
* USB cable
* Slide, 35mm & 120 film holders
* Drivers and scanning software including Adobe Photo Elements



The included ScanGear scanning software was very simple to use:


My test scan was a 35mm negative around 16 years old. I decided to scan at 4800dpi as I had plenty of time to kill. Without adjusting the image settings too much, at 4800dpi each photo took approximately 6 - 8 minutes to scan.

Example scan (on a QX6700, 8Gb RAM, Vista x64):


Click on image to open full size (~4MB)

I was more than happy with the results and for the price it is certainly good value for money. So far I have scanned over 300 negatives and it hasn't missed a beat.

Price:
Speed:
Quality:
Overall: