Canon CanoScan N650U USB Flatbed Scanner

I bought this scanner 8 years ago from Best Buy. It has worked flawlessly with paint shop pro in that time. The only draw back now, is that its only USB 1.1, but thats because in 2000, there was no USB 2.0. This is the product that made Canon one of my favorite brands.

I remember this scanner as being good and working well. That is until I changed over to using a mac. Now I can't find a driver for it anywhere - not even on the various worldwide canon websites. All they have are a plug-in to use with Photoshop and an uninstaller - you'd think they would create a driver to install before having an uninstaller, right?

I am very frustrated and haven't been able to find anything useful after long searches. If canon aren't interested in keeping their older models functional or providing updated software/drivers for them, then it will only be a short while before whatever you have bought is forcibly obsolete and you have to buy another one while throwing out something that is in perfect working order (if only you could get an update for it).

I don't want to throw out my scanner and I don't want to have to buy another one, it's such a waste of products and money. Add to that a Canon digital camera that broke in less than a year (when I then I found out my warranty was only for 6 months) and a Canon printer that is very unreliable, and I am not very happy with Canon at all. They advertise themselves as a high-end, reliable brand, but from my experience they are not and I won't be buying any more canon products in the future.

I have had this scanner for a couple of years and I loved it with my old Windows 98 computer and my Mac OS 9.0 laptop. Then I bought a Mac Mini with OS 10x. I have had compatibility nightmares ever since.

I found out that it'll work with OS 10 IF and ONLY IF I install Adobe PhotoShop or Elements. Why should I have to spend $100 or more on software to get an $80 scanner to work? So, I got my laptop back out and started scanning and working on my graphics files on the laptop, where I have expensive programs that I cannot yet afford to replace. But in order to get an external CD Burner to work I had to upgrade to OS 9.1.

Now, after just upgrading from Mac OS 9.0 to 9.1 I have to go through the whole process of troubleshooting again. I've already spent half a day in total frustration.

This scanner should be off the market - without new drivers it's totally useless. It's more of a shame because I had liked it very much until a couple of months ago. There should be no reason for Canon and/or Mac to get appropriate drivers up and online.

I had this scanner for a couple years. I thought it worked really good. I used it mainly for scanning pictures, and they were very sharp. Then one day the glass shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces with no apparent explaination.

Unlike some of the others with this unit, I had no trouble installing and using it (one I got the right drivers, that is -- J&R Music world initially sent me the wrong disk, grrr).

Though it runs a little slow, it does make reasonably clean scans, and makes MUCH less clutter on and behind my desk than most other machines, which is why I bought it.

People need to know, however, that the lens has crummy depth-of field, which means that anything that is not dead flat against the glass will look fuzzy. My previous scanner could make acceptable images of small three-dimensional objects; this one won't.

Also, the color balance is kind of off, too blue-tinged. With my Paint Shop Pro, I need to subtract a little blue and add a little red to the scans to make them look like real life.

I assume that both these problems (poor depth of field and color imbalance) come from the dim scanning lamp neccesitated by the low power available to the unit.