I recently broke out my old Pentax SLR and have been enjoying the delayed gratification of shooting film again (stick with me, it's relevant). I was looking for a negative scanner since I don't currently have access to a darkroom, and found a used Canon CanoScan8800F on Craigslist. After buying it and trying to get it running at home, I discovered that neither Apple nor Canon has produced a driver that is compatible with this scanner since about 2015. Yosemite was the last OS that was compatible. For clarification, I'm running a Late '11 MBP 13", that I swapped in a 125GB SSD, 16GB RAM, and I pulled the SuperDrive and replaced it with a tray with a 1TB HDD, hence the small main drive. I'm currently running macOS 10.15.6 Catalina. Yes, I'm rocking a really old machine but it does everything I ask of it and more.
After a couple of days of searching the collective wisdom of the Internet, it was suggested to abandon entirely the idea of using the Canon software and a download program called VueScan, which came with generally good reviews all around. It connects to pretty much any scanner made and will work to use it's features, and it has a free trial, but to save the files you attempt to scan without a watermark you have to purchase the program, $40 to use the plain scanning features, $100 to use it with negative/slide scanning features. I didn't want to drop $100 on a program to run a scanner I bought for $20. And I wasn't at all impressed with the image quality I got with VueScan, even after playing with some scanner settings (perhaps because I hadn't bought the program, but I'd think they'd want to put their best foot forward to potential buyers, but who knows?). So back to the collective wisdom of the internet I went.
I decided to dig out an old hard drive I had, wipe it, do a clean install of Yosemite, and just plug it in and boot to it when I want to scan negatives. Then save to the internal HDD so I can access it when booting normally to my SSD. An alternative is to partition the main SSD/HDD and install Yosemite in the new partition. I finally got it all running last night and I'm really impressed with the image quality I get and how easy the native software is to use. Mostly just putting this out there for anyone who runs into a similar issue. I try to share my successes on forums because so often people get on them with a problem, get a bunch of suggestions, and then you never hear from them what the solution was. Hopefully this will help someone at some future point.
A note for anyone looking for this and having trouble: download the installer on Safari, it wouldn't download from Chrome but it was suggested to try on Safari and it worked immediately.
I used this helpful page to make a bootable Yosemite installer on a thumb drive and erase a HDD and install it:
www.macworld.co.uk
I downloaded the installer from Apple at this page (hopefully it's still up, it's the oldest one still up as of this writing):
support.apple.com
I downloaded the drivers and program to use with the scanner from Canon here:
www.usa.canon.com
After a couple of days of searching the collective wisdom of the Internet, it was suggested to abandon entirely the idea of using the Canon software and a download program called VueScan, which came with generally good reviews all around. It connects to pretty much any scanner made and will work to use it's features, and it has a free trial, but to save the files you attempt to scan without a watermark you have to purchase the program, $40 to use the plain scanning features, $100 to use it with negative/slide scanning features. I didn't want to drop $100 on a program to run a scanner I bought for $20. And I wasn't at all impressed with the image quality I got with VueScan, even after playing with some scanner settings (perhaps because I hadn't bought the program, but I'd think they'd want to put their best foot forward to potential buyers, but who knows?). So back to the collective wisdom of the internet I went.
I decided to dig out an old hard drive I had, wipe it, do a clean install of Yosemite, and just plug it in and boot to it when I want to scan negatives. Then save to the internal HDD so I can access it when booting normally to my SSD. An alternative is to partition the main SSD/HDD and install Yosemite in the new partition. I finally got it all running last night and I'm really impressed with the image quality I get and how easy the native software is to use. Mostly just putting this out there for anyone who runs into a similar issue. I try to share my successes on forums because so often people get on them with a problem, get a bunch of suggestions, and then you never hear from them what the solution was. Hopefully this will help someone at some future point.
A note for anyone looking for this and having trouble: download the installer on Safari, it wouldn't download from Chrome but it was suggested to try on Safari and it worked immediately.
I used this helpful page to make a bootable Yosemite installer on a thumb drive and erase a HDD and install it:
How to create a bootable USB masOS installer
Make a macOS installer with createinstallmedia and install Monterey or another macOS on multiple Macs, do a clean install, or access a faulty Mac.
www.macworld.co.uk
I downloaded the installer from Apple at this page (hopefully it's still up, it's the oldest one still up as of this writing):
How to download and install macOS - Apple Support
Download and install current or previous versions of the Mac operating system on compatible Mac computers.
I downloaded the drivers and program to use with the scanner from Canon here:
Canon Support for CanoScan 8800F | Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Find support for your Canon CanoScan 8800F. Browse the recommended drivers, downloads, and manuals to make sure your product contains the most up-to-date software.
www.usa.canon.com
