Great performance Scanner (Canon Canoscan D1250U2)

Member Name: geordieboy12

Product:	Canon Canoscan D1250U2
Date:	31/12/03 (497 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great quality scanning

Disadvantages: none

The truth be known you get as good a quality image out of this scanner as some of the £500 ones I have seen in my line of work.
Thats right, for almost quarter of the price you can be producing the sort of scanned images that professionals use.
Whats more Canon have made this scanner simple to use for everyone. Whether you are a techie or a home user, you too can get great results by creating digital from your own paper pics.

Lets have a look at the scanner then.
Basically it is the size of a regular scanner. Box shape and slightly larger than a sheet of A4 paper. It stands about as high as a cigarette packet and has a brightly coloured Purple/blue lid. This is the item that lets scanners down on the whole. I find scanner lids to be cumbersome, flimsy and a wast of space. However, this feels sturdy in the hand and snug on the scanned documents. In fact, the lid adjusts vertically and horizontally to allow you to stick large books underneath AND still git the document flat to the scanner.

Features.
Where do I start? This is goig to make you eyes pop out.
In the past, scanning was only part of the process of preparing the image for its destination. Once the image is on your PC, you then needed to prepare it in a design package and then open a seperate mail application for mailing or printing application for printing. Not anymore!
Now with the press of one of 4 ingenious buttons on the front, you can link your scan straight to an email or printer. This cuts out all of the prep work and gets your image to where you want it quicker.

Next up is the film adapter. Yep. If you have negatives at home and want to transfer them to your PC, you can thanks to this little device. It means you can achieve your best results directly from film rather than losing some quality by scanning from prints. This is activated from one of the 4 buttons already mentioned.

USB technology has removed the need for hogging your printer por
t on your PC. Before you had to choose `Printer or Scanner`. you could not have them both connected as they needed the same cable and port. Now, the Scanner sits on a spare USB port (if you have one) and this also increases the image transfer speed tremendously.

Resolution.
At the highest resolution, we are talking absolute crystal clear images. Unfortunately, the memory size of the image will still be huge (sometimes many megs worth per image) but you can at least get it if you want it.
This has got to be one of the best scanner I have used for resolution. There is absolutely no graining whatsoever. Perfectly clear and crisp. It claims that its built in image correction removes scratches and dirt but I havent scanned any dirty images in. Well, not that sort anyway! lol.

Installation.
Very quick. Thanks to its USB interface it is a matter of plugging it in and letting the computer do the rest. My Windows 2000 machine here at work has the drivers built into it and did not need the ones supplied with the scanner but it doe scome with them just in case.
Within a couple of minutes I was scanning,printing and mailing.

software included?
It comes with all of the following:

ScanGear
ArcSoft PhotoBase
Adobe Photoshop Elements
ScanSoft OmniPage Pro OCR
PhotoRecord

While none of them are world beating names you will recognise (other than adobe) they all serve their particular function in making the scanner deliver its best performance. I nfact, you dont actually trigger many of the applications themselves. It is done by the scanner. It starts and stops the various bits of image production software as it needs it. All is extremely easy to use.

Price.
In PC world, I believe you can pick one up for around £130 now. This is extremely good value for money, considering its feature packed performance.
I would recommend one ito anyone who wants to scan.

Summary: