Scanner on the way out?

[jamespetts]

I have (well, it's my father's, but I'm the one responsible for maintaining it) a Canoscan 9900F flatbed/film combination scanner. Recently, all of the images that it has been scanning (we have been using it mainly for colour transparancies) have been coming out muddy and grey with poor contrast. Turning on "exposure data saving", and setting the gamma to 1 make the image darker, but there is still a significant loss of shadow detail, which cannot be made much better in image editing software (The GIMP, using curves to boost shadow lightness).

I'm sure that the pictures that it scanned didn't used to be as bad as this. Am I right in remembering that scanner lamps wear out with time? I think that my father has often left the scanner turned on for long periods of time in the past. If the problem is likely to be lamp failure, can lamps on scanners (and that make and model of scanner in particular) be replaced, and if so, at what price? Presumably a factory re-fitting is involved.

Thank you in advance for any help

 

[Xenocide]

IIRC sometimes they have to be recalibrated after a certain number of uses, id contact the manufacturer for some info

 

[jamespetts]

Thank you for your reply - I've contacted Canon with the description of the problem, so I'll have to see what they say.

In the meantime, though, has anybody else had experience with scanners needing new lamps, or having the sort of problem described above?