Labs

Canon's CanoScan 8800F is the company's top-of-the-range scanner, and comes with suitably high-end software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements. It uses CCD rather than CIS scan technology, which makes it bulkier and more power hungry than the other Canon scanners here, but it should produce brighter, more accurately coloured images.

The CanoScan 8800F has separate holders for different sizes of film. These can hold two six-frame strips of 35mm film, four slides or three frames of 120 format film. Canon's FARE feature detects and eliminates dust and minute scratches from film, although enabling it can more than double scan times.

Transparency scans were particularly smooth and sharp. At default settings, they were more

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warmly coloured but darker than negative scans from Epson's Perfection V200. The excellent interface made it easy to tweak our settings, although a colour inversion option on the preview screen would have made it easier to work out optimal settings for negative scanning. Sadly, despite the beautifully smooth scan quality, we couldn't produce negative scans that equalled the bright, clear colouring of those made by the Perfection V200, and many of our images were underexposed.

This didn't affect photo scans, which were generally sharp, bright and accurately coloured, while 150 and 300dpi A4 document scans were easy to read. In its normal reflective scan mode for photos and documents, the interface's pull-down menu offers resolutions up to just 1,200dpi. Higher resolutions have to be entered manually, but this is a minor inconvenience. Scans were quick, particularly for transparencies, and it took just over two-and-a-half minutes to scan a frame of film at the maximum resolution of 4,800dpi.

The 8800F produced astonishingly smooth high-resolution scans, but transparency scans lacked the vibrant colour of those from Epson's Perfection V200, which is half the price. However, the 8800F is a good choice if you need the higher resolution and have the time to adjust your images before or after scanning.