Plustek 8200i with Silverfast and VueScan
The Plustek 8200i is an excellent scanner, it came with Silverfast but I'll talk about that software later. I spent a lot of time looking at reviews, I could have got a flatbed scanner but as most of my slides and negatives are 35mm I came to the conclusion that a dedicated 35 mm film/slide scanner would have the edge on quality.
The scanner is very well built, there is no warm up time, it was easy to position the film and slides in the holder, resolution is excellent, the optimum for me was 3600dpi scan, a sharp slide will give a fairly sharp image which really needs a little bit of extra sharpening in Photoshop. At 7200 dpi file size is huge and I could see no more image detail than the 3600 dpi scan. The infra red dust removal works really well but you do need software that can use the IR channel.
I especially wanted to scan my collection of 35 mm unmounted transparencies, and I needed some good quality results for printing up to A3 size. My slides were all shot on Fuji Velvia or Kodak Ektachrome.
The software was easy to install and I had the scanner working in a few minutes. The first scan was a 'QuickScan' using Plustek's own software, the colour balance and exposure was spot on but the QuickScan does not have IR dust removal which I really wanted to use.
Then I tried Silverfast, a terrible experience for me, spent days tweaking all the settings to get colour balance correct in the shadows and highlights, I never managed to get a perfect result. Silverfast also had additional big drawbacks over alternative software, in my version you could not save the RAW file, it only works with one scanner type and if you ever do get the settings near right, you cannot save the settings.
After 3 frustrating days trying Silverfast at every conceivable setting I gave up and purchased VueScan. What a difference, some excellent results in minutes, and the settings for each film type could be saved. I used the IR channel to automatically remove dust, you can choose a single scan, of multiple passes (to reduce noise), and multi exposure (to improve detail in the shadows). Best of all you can save your perfect settings and reload them next time you use the scanner. With Vuescan you can save the RAW file and/or adjusted tiff and/or jpeg.
After some experiments my preferred workflow was as follows: launch VueScan, resolution 3600dpi, one, two, or three passes, multiple exposure, colour balance neutral, dust removal medium, no noise reduction or sharpening. I then tweaked each scan in PhotoShop , while the next slide was scanned. This was the best compromise between time, quality and file size and I am very pleased with the results.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
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