Having transferred to digital film some time ago I had a cupboard full of 35mm slides and for a while had been tempted to buy a dedicated slide scanner but apart from semi professional slide scanners costing hundreds of pounds all the reviews of "domestic quality" scanners were quite honestly awful. Then I read a favourable review of the Canon Canoscan 5600F. Not only was this a general purpose flatbed scanner for documents etc., it promised high quality digital images from 35mm colour positive and negative film.
I have been using this scanner now for one week (with a PC running XP) and begun the task of transferring my sizeable library of slides to digital format.
It is so simple to use that I have not even needed to read the instruction manual (apart from an initial browse through the Quick Start Guide).
Open the 'MP Navigator EX' window, set the film type and required resolution (up to 4800 dpi), load the slides into the tray (up to four at a time), and begin the process. Almost immediately you get pre-scan views of the slides, select those you wish to scan and begin. Depending on the resolution, scanning will take about 2 minutes per slide, quite slow with a gentle whirring noise from the scanner but the resulting quality is worth the wait. When the scans are complete you can select from a variety of file formats and on saving, the images are transferred in a folder to your desired location.
The resulting quality and colour of the images is simply outstanding. When scanned at 4800dpi setting, A4 prints at 300 dpi are readily obtainable and 5"x7" prints at 300 dpi with scan setting of 2400 dpi.
There are many other features that I have yet to explore but I can thoroughly recommend this scanner to anyone wanting to archive film to digital format.