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Canon CanoScan 9950F

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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- Canon CanoScan 9950F
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Canon CanoScan 9950F is an all-purpose scanner with good OCR accuracy, one-button scanning to PDF format, and a bundled document-management program. But the emphasis is on film, with scans of reasonably good quality and a design that lets you easily scan film in a range of sizes.

Pros & Cons

    • Slide-scanning features are far ahead of most flatbed scanners.
    • Color-restore feature.
    • Good OCR accuracy.
    • Scans directly to PDF format.
    • No ADF.
    • Dust and scratch removal feature doesn't do much.

Canon CanoScan 9950F Specs

Automatic Document Feeder: No
Ethernet Interface: No
Flatbed: Yes
Maximum Optical Resolution: 4800 pixels
Maximum Scan Area: Letter
Mechanical Resolution: 9600 pixels
One-Touch Buttons: Yes
Scanning Options: Reflective
Scanning Options: Transparency
USB or FireWire Interface: USB
All Specs

The Canon CanoScan 9950F ($399.99 direct) flatbed scanner encroaches on territory usually reserved for film scanners. With a claimed 4,800 pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution and 9,600-ppi mechanical resolution, plus the ability to scan film at sizes from 35-mm to 4-by-5 inch format, it's one of the few flatbeds to succeed at film scanning. In addition, the 9950F offers a solid all-purpose package for document management, OCR, scanning to e-mail, and scanning photos.

Scanners' actual resolution is limited more often by their optics than by the number of pixels. That's not a problem with the 9950F. At any given resolution setting, its scans show more detail than scans from any other flatbed model we've tested, including our other Editors' Choice in the field, the CanoScan 8400F. Just as important, the 9950F (like the 8400F) does far better than most flatbeds on dynamic range (the ability to retain detail across the range from black to white). With one hard-to-scan slide in particular, it did a remarkably good job with details in both a dark tree line and clouds in a bright sky. The scan quality isn't a match for the best film scanners, but it's better than some.

The 9950F also offers some touches that make film scanning easier. The transparency adapter in the scanner top covers the entire platen, and the unit comes with a variety of templates to match. The template for slides, for example, holds up to 12 slides at once, instead of the usual two to four. That speeds up the mechanics of setting up a scan, and it makes the process easier than with other flatbeds or even many dedicated film scanners. The 9950F also scored well for photographic prints, with good scan quality and a color-restore feature for faded prints.

More surprising, it's also relatively strong on such business-oriented applications as OCR and document management. For OCR, it comes with OmniPage SE 2.0, and was able to read text as small as 8 points in both Times New Roman and Arial fonts without a mistake. For document management, it comes with Presto! PageManager 6.11. We also like the front-panel buttons for scanning to PDF format and to e-mail.

We'd like the 9950F even better if it had an automatic document feeder, but even without one, it's one of the better all-purpose scanners we've seen.

Sub-ratings:
Photos:
Slides:
Business cards: N/A
Document Management:
OCR:

More scanner reviews:

Final Thoughts

- Canon CanoScan 9950F

Canon CanoScan 9950F

4.0 Excellent

The Canon CanoScan 9950F is an all-purpose scanner with good OCR accuracy, one-button scanning to PDF format, and a bundled document-management program. But the emphasis is on film, with scans of reasonably good quality and a design that lets you easily scan film in a range of sizes.

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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