Canon CanoScan 5600F

Any flatbed scanner is technically suitable for all-purpose scanning, since you can scan anything on it. But some are clearly targeted more for some uses than others. A case in point is the Canon CanoScan 5600F ($149.99 direct), which focuses on photos, and does its job well enough to deliver relatively high-quality scans for both photographic prints and film. Not many scanners manage both kinds of scans well, particularly at the 5600F's price. That by itself is enough to make the scanner stand out—especially if you're on a tight budget.

The 5600F is similar in many ways to the Canon CanoScan 8800F, a more-expensive cousin that is faster and comes with more software. Both offer 4,800 pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution; both use LEDs as their light source for reflective scans to largely eliminate warm-up time before scanning; and both are limited to scanning only four slides at a time for transparency scanning. Unlike the 8800F, however, the 5600F can scan only one six-frame strip of film at a time rather than two, and it uses a traditional cold cathode fluorescent lamp, rather than an LED light source, for scanning transparencies.

Setting up the 5600F is absolutely typical for a flatbed scanner. Install the software, unlock the scanner, and then plug in the power cord and USB cable. I tested the scanner primarily under Windows XP, but also installed it under Vista just to confirm that it worked. Canon says it also provides drivers and a full set of programs for Windows 2000 and Mac OS 10.3.9 through 10.5.x. The bundled software is limited to Canon's scan utility plus ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 for editing photos, but the utility includes optical character recognition, so you can scan a document and turn it into editable text or a searchable PDF file.

In addition to letting you start a scan using the scan utility, the 5600F offers buttons on the top front of the scanner. The choices include Copy, E-Mail (to launch an e-mail message on your PC and add the scanned document as an attachment), and Scan (to bring up the Canon utility and let you choose where to send the scan). There are also three PDF buttons—one for scanning in color, one for scanning in black and white, and one custom button. To scan multipage documents to a single PDF file, you can repeatedly press the same PDF button for each new page, and then press the Finish button after the last page.

Like most scanners, the 5600F comes with both Twain and WIA drivers, so you can scan from almost any Windows program with a scan command. (Of course, you'll have to buy any additional programs you want to use.) That's something to keep in mind when you're comparing the 5600F with other scanners. A more-expensive scanner that already has the software you need may be less expensive than the 5600F and the added software combined.

The Twain driver gives you the choice between exceptional ease of use and control over the scan. The AutoScan mode literally handles everything automatically, letting you scan with a single mouse click. If you prefer having some control over the results, the Basic mode gives you a few options to set and the Advanced mode adds far more, including such sophisticated choices as adjusting color saturation and balance. All three modes let you scan multiple photos on the flatbed at once, with each photo going to a separate file.

As I've pointed out in other Canon scanner reviews, the Canon driver's backlight correction feature is a strong plus. A picture that includes both dark and bright areas tends to lose the details in the dark areas—for example, in an indoor picture of someone standing in front of a window, the foreground often becomes a silhouette. Canon's backlight correction automatically adjusts the brightness and contrast in different parts of the image so you can see details in the foreground without losing the details in the background.

Another well-thought-out feature is the option to correct color settings by choosing from 19 thumbnail images, each with slightly different color correction. Picking the version that looks best is a lot easier than the traditional—and counterintuitive—approach of adjusting red, green, and blue levels. If you're already comfortable using the traditional approach, however, the driver will let you adjust color that way, too.

Other driver options let you restore color to faded photos and remove dust and scratches. The features worked reasonably well on my tests for restoring colors and removing dust specs but had little to no effect on scratches. This is fully predictable for a software-based scratch removal feature; the only versions of scratch removal that work well to date are hardware based.

The 5600F's scan quality was a touch short of the best that I've seen, but more than good enough to satisfy even a serious amateur photographer. Photos that I scanned from prints and then reprinted on an Epson PictureMate printer very nearly matched the originals, and scans from slides offered the same high quality. Overall, the 5600F's scan quality puts it in the same league as both the 8800F and the more-expensive Editors' Choice Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner.

In sharp contrast with its scan quality, the 5600F's speed is not one of its strong points. That said, at least the LED light source largely eliminates warm-up time for reflective scans, so the speed is reasonably consistent from one scan to the next. I timed it at 19 to 25 seconds to scan a 4-by-6 photo at 300 pixels per inch (ppi), and a somewhat sluggish 48 seconds to scan the same photo at 400 ppi (suitable for printing at 8 by 10 inches). Transparency scanning is slower still, at 2 minutes 3 seconds to scan a single slide at 2,400 ppi—a relatively low resolution for slide scanning. The 8800F took 1:11 to scan the same slide at 2,400 ppi, and just 13.8 seconds to scan the photo at 400 ppi.

It's a given that any scanner that focuses on photos will have limitations when it comes to office tasks. In particular, the lack of an automatic document feeder (ADF) means having to scan one document page at a time, which limits the scanner's usefulness for document management and text recognition. That said, the 5600F's optical character recognition (OCR) is good enough to use on short documents. On my tests it read without error Times New Roman text at sizes as small as 10 points and Arial at sizes as small as 12 points.

Also worth mentioning is the one-year parts-and-labor warranty with Canon's InstantExchange option. If Canon's support techs can't fix a problem over the phone and the scanner is still under warranty, Canon will ship you a replacement scanner along with a prepaid return shipping label, so you can send the original scanner back.

The 5600F won't win any awards for speed, and it doesn't come with a lot of software. But if you're looking for an inexpensive scanner that will give you high-quality scans for both photographic prints and film, and you're not overly impatient, it just may be the scanner you're looking for. The combination of scan quality and driver ease of use and features is enough to make it the low-cost Editors' Choice for scanning photos.

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