Customer Reviews
High quality and portable
My job has me on the road quite a bit and I needed a 'road' scanner for creating pdf's of documents for e-mailing back to the office. I purchased the LiDE 500F based on it's size and USB powering. This was a gamble but the price was low enough so . . .
After using the scanner for 6 months I've had zero issues running it under Windows XP Pro. The simplicty of use and size makes it a pleasure to use. I have since disposed of a larger supposedly higher quality desktop scanner and put my little portable LiDE 500F in its place.
The quality was much better than expected. The white balance is spot on and since it uses LEDs and not a lamp the stability of the settings are fantastic.
I would purchase it again with no hesitation.
Works great with OSX
I have a Mac running OS X 10.3.9. I had a previous model of Canon which my son broke and I was willing to try a Canon again. The scanner works well via the on board buttons. I installed the latest relaease of Canoscan's toolbox, which I plucked from Canon's website. Scans are fairly fast and high quality. I use the Toolbox interface to get my scans, using the 'save' option. You can asign this function to the scan button. I think by default the button scanned to an application. I have not been able to set up scanning directly to iPhoto. I scan, and save the file to pictures/my pictures/date where date is the current day.
Multi scan works great once I figured out you have to leave a half inch gap between photos. Also, auto crop is pretty good but sometimes does not crop the image from the full platen size.
The scans are fantastic for color and contrast.
This scanner has a nice physical design. a bit larger than my previous one, but the built in stand is nice and most of my scanning, when I am doing one picture or a sheet of paper, I can do while the scanner is stood up on its stand.
I have not tried the transparancy tool yet.
Awesome document scanner
Bought this scanner because of it's zero warm up time and straight to PDF scanning. This is a really awesome scanner for this purpose. I can scan a document to PDF at 400 DPI(the highest it will do B&W) in <12 seconds. The no warm up is really awesome. Forget all this preview junk, just sacn it the first time. This is a PERFECT SCANNER for a band director looking to archive music electronically. With other scanners I've had, first have to scan to an image, then print to PDF driver. My previous scanner (an older HP scanjet) took 90 seconds to complete the same task (using 600 DPI). Quality is perfectly good at 400 DPI for the job, and I have no regrets.
I had no issues installing or using, no lines that I can see. I haven't tried color yet (and probably won't for some time). The only thing I've found to complain about is the USB cable coming out the front. What idiot decided that. The document glass sometimes requires a little push to shut flush and block all the light on a single 8.5x11, but these are all veyr minor gripes. This device is really small. That wasn't a conern to me, but I was comparing to the 8400 also by Canon, and this one was cheaper, so I went with it. No regrets at all, very fast. Don't discount the no warm up time. Those 1-2 seconds add up when you're scanning 60 pages. This one scans immediately and quickly.
