I am running XP on a 1 year old laptop (AMD 64 Athlon - EMachine) I believe I left out one app, can't remember which. The software took longer to install than I would have liked but was uneventful. It looks like there are 2 traveling assemblies, one in the bottom and one in the top for the film backlight. Installation: Fairly straight forward, the Canonscan is pretty large.
I have spent about a week scanning old black and white negatives (not continuously, just about 2 or 3 hours a day) and have the following good and bad things to say about the Canon 8600F I'll be glad to report the comparsion results of pro scans once I've done them. When working at these larger sizes and pushing the limits, it is clearly going to involve much more work. The grey scales straight out of the scans are great and are pretty much in line with the detail and density on the negs. I'm sure that this can be taken care of with noise ninja or similar. I feel that when I make the scans, which are very large in size, I'm seeing the film grain, but also some added noise from the scanner.
I'm now working in photo shop to see if I can overcome some of my issues. I find the interface for PhotoStudio 5.5 a bit dull, but the product seems to work well. I don'e expect there would be much benefit to increasing the dpi, but worth a try for that size I expect. Files are large, 276 megs for a 44" scan at 400 dpi. When I work to 50% of that size (22 inches) the images are still suffering from a little softness. To be fair, the images look good and I'm only seeing slices as tests on 8.5 X 11 paper, but it's clear that 4 X 5 would be a better choice here so far. These images are softer than I would like to see and I'm planning to compare them to scans done professionally. However, my mission is to try to push the envelope so I'm working some files from 6 X 6 to print at say 44" square. I've found that the results are excellent when producing work for smaller print sizes, say at about 8.5 X 11 or 11 X 14. Also, my work at the moment is focusing on Black and White using both plus-X and T-Max 100 as the original negatives. I've been working with the 8600 for a couple of days now.
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