Hi Mike My Canon 9900F has a strong magenta cast when not warmed up on the first scans. Simply warming up the lamps once does not cure that, after a few preview scans, the results are getting better and are quite color neutral. Sometimes I use the scanner calibration in Scan gear too if the casts are too strong, that helps.
I bought mine as a reduced price article as it had been on display. Everything was there, inc. the Canon SCSI card. But the card was non-functional... By the time everything was together (I had to buy a new computer - the 66MHz 486 was not capable of driving the scanner) it was nearly a year after I bought it. The joy of producing digital colour images blinded me to the obvious faults of the machine [sound familiar, anyone 8-)] and it was another few months before I realised that all was not rosy in the garden of Eden.
Suffice it to say that I have never had a satisfactory scan from the machine. I have been assured by professional people that there is nothing wrong with it but:
a. I think it does not focus properly (manual focus moves the lens group with no discernable difference in output....)
b. colour bit depth is inadequate
c. I have grown to hate it with a mighty passion.
Sometimes, "color correction" in the Scangear settings produces false results, did you try dis/enabling it and comparing the results with black areas. Maybe that helps against the noise too?
My software is Scancraft. It has limited possibilities to help, partly due to b above.
Your scanner does not have grain reduction, right?
It seems to have inbuilt grain _enhancement_ combined with "occasional stripiness", "black speckle", "cartoon colours" and "software designed by management consultants".
mike
