Canon Canoscan CS4400F

cut to the chase. tried direct from screen .. then close up lenses .. extention tubes & now a 4400f dedicated film scanner to copy my slides. Ive been messing with photos / lenses etc for a long time now (years) .. so ive had some experience. I new there were film scanners out there .. but never looked into it till now.The Canon 4400f scanner is not a expensive way to get your best slides to disk. Albeit the 4400 is a bottom of the range scanner .. & will scan slides & negative film strip .. on testing out of the box its a step forward from using close up lenses etc. The 1st impression was the bright & colourfull image produced. Using close up lenses i had dreadfull lens scatter all round the edges .. blue / yellow splashes of color. On inspection of the scanned images i couldnt detect any of this at all! What a breath of fresh air. So 2 days later ... using the scanner at 1600dpi - turned all the AUTO settings off - using in Advanced mode .. the slides have been copying very good. To enhance the images further without overly exposing the highlights .. i found the Fade Correction to be rather good.This seems to work better than the Backlight adjustment.The only other setting im using is the Grain Correction in MED. These setting are for HI-Q Jpeg. I tried 2400dpi & 3200dpi in Jpeg with no real improvement except for a larger final image. Ok using BMP or TIFF. One final thing i like .. is that each image scanned (slides - film strip) .. have their own independent editing .. so a very flexible scanner. Copying is always a difficult job .. wether its audio or video .. there is always a trade off. VERDICT: FOR: i cant compare it to a more expensive model .. but i would recommend this for starters. Good bright clean images. Works well using Win98SE USB 1.0. Lots of Pre-scan adjustment. Good cropping. A reasonable price considering PC gear tends to need replacing on a regular basis due to upgrades. CONS: some editing settings are within a scrollable frame .. which would be nice if they were in a Tabbed box for quick access.