Review of the Canon CanoScan 9000F Flatbed Scanner

The first thing you'll notice about the CanoScan 9000F flatbed scanner is that it's quite large--that's so it can handle documents up to 11.7 inches long. That's handy, though you need to really need to scan paper this long since it means the scanner eats up as much desktop space as a typical all-in-one printer. You'll also notice that it's fairly minimalist, with only seven buttons on top (and an on-off button). Four of those buttons help create PDFs; unfortunately you'll also notice that the icons on each button are abstract enough to be unintelligible. However, a quick browse through the Quick Start Guide indicates potentially they are for scanning in color (at 300 dpi as default); scanning in black and white; custom scanning; and a "finish" button that "ends the operation and saves the scanned image in a PDF file." Actually, each time I pressed a button, a window opened asking me if I wanted to use HP Button Manager, MP Navigator, or OmniPage. The correct answer is MP Navigator--the other two don't seem to do anything.

MP Navigator is perhaps the extensive suite of software that include the CanoScan 9000F, which also includes version 8 of Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is excellent photo-editing software. MP Navigator gives you choices including scan to e-mail, scan to PDF, and scan directly to OCR software. This last one was a bit odd, I thought, as it uses Notepad rather than Microsoft Word for the final result of the OCR scan. You will want to change your preferences, though; at the default 300 dpi, the OCR results were pretty weak, while at 400 dpi they seemed noticeably better (you can scan at up to 600 dpi).