Interesting "review"... really more a series of experiments... but I don't know how much help it would be to someone trying to decide whether or not this is the scanner to buy! So here are a few supplementary comments...
I do have an 8800F, and I'm still not sure whether I made the right choice or not. I needed a relatively inexpensive scanner that could handle medium-format film, and I decided to go with the Canon over the Epson V500 because it was about $50 less expensive and I've had good results from Canon scanners in the past.
The LED light source makes ad-hoc scanning a breeze, since the thing requires absolutely no warm-up time -- just push the power button and you're ready to scan. Don't be misled into thinking the LEDs reduce scanning time, though -- this still seems similar to non-LED scanners I've used, and a moderately-high-res scan of a full strip of negatives will take around 20 minutes to complete.
I feel the scanning software supplied with the Canon is pretty crummy -- all the adjustments are there if you are willing to hunt long enough through the cluttered user interface, but the way it names and saves batch scans is VERY inconvenient. VueScan is better in this department, but I haven't yet gotten it to work properly with the 8800F and my Intel MacBook... VueScan recognizes the scanner, but always crashes during the first attempt to scan. (I do have a version that lists the 8800F as a supported scanner, and I've done the resource-renaming trick mentioned in the release notes, but it still doesn't work. I need to check to see if there's been a further revision...)
While 35mm film scans on the 8800F aren't as detailed as those I get from my old (and extremely slow) Canon FS4000 dedicated film scanner, they're not bad, and the 8800F is more forgiving of negative defects and seems less prone to grain aliasing.
Medium-format film scans, though, have been a disappointment so far -- tonality looks good, but sharpness seems sub-par. Unlike the Stockholm reviewer, I'm not willling to try taking my scanner apart and taping the negatives to the underside of the glass, but maybe some more USM would help.
The film holders seem cheesy compared to my old FS4000 holders -- the 8800F's are made of rather flexy plastic, and the 35mm strip holder requires you to slide the end of the film under a pair of tiny hooks that are a bit fiddly. The holders seem unlikely to break, though, and the 35mm strip holder has a clever design for the hinged retainers so that if you bend them too far, they'll simply pop off their hinges rather than breaking. (They're easily popped back on thanks to the flexibility of the plastic.)
So as I said, I still don't know whether or not the 8800F was the best possible buy for my $200. But in practice, I'm seldom completely happy with film scans from any scanner I've tried, including dedicated film scanners, so I'm not sure that buying a much more expensive model -- say, an Epson V750 -- would have been a good investment for me.
In fact, it was my general dissatisfaction with film scanners that eventually drove me to cough up the bucks for an Epson R-D 1 camera, and I have to say that to my eyes, shots from the R-D 1 look vastly better than those scanned from any of my film-camera negatives. The film scans have higher pixel counts, but their tonal range and color are more limited, and they're easily marred by even tiny scratches and dirt particles in the emulsion. The real deal-breaker for me is the grain aliasing, which makes many of my negs shot on high-speed films unacceptably coarse when scanned (even though they look fine in wet-darkroom prints.)
So, my only real use for a film scanner is to capture and catalog my pre-digital photos. Since no scanner I've tried gives me scans that really satisfy me in terms of quality, I suppose the main factors should be how easy the scanner is to live with and how quickly it produces "acceptably mediocre" results. On those counts I guess the Canon hardware measures up reasonably well -- the quick startup is great, and the software (fiddly though it is) gives tolerable results with little tweaking. I'd still like to figure out how to get VueScan going, though...
UPDATE: Yesterday I downloaded a more recent version of VueScan (released 12/22 -- gotta admit that Hamrick is very good about updates!) Among the changes noted in the release notes was a fix related to the 8800F, and sure enough, I now can scan successfully with it.
Using VueScan doesn't really seem to give better-quality scans than the Canon software, and getting the right options set for VueScan is still a bit of an adventure. But it's worth using VueScan because it does a better job of naming the output files, which is important when you're doing batch scans.
