I recently bought one of these because of the limitations of my ageing flatbed scanner. It's a nice piece of kit, solid and well made and the scans are probably about as good as is possible from my old negatives. However, the Silverfast software is troublesome to set up and understand and I found that on my 4K monitor the fonts used were so small that I could only see them with a magnifying glass ! The only solution (since I already had magnification set to 200%) was to reduce screen resolution to 1920 x 1080 while using the scanner. Also note that the scanner only has manual transport of the trays so you have to push them through to scan each image. Scan time is fairly quick and after a bit of practice the scanner is worth the investment.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
This scanner can out resolve any known film and has greater dynamic range, so everything on the film is going to be captured. The advantage of oversampling like this is that any slight quality loss due to colour correction, cropping or rotating will be invisible. Images can be downsized after processing. The colour rendering of film is not very good, so to be able to colour balance in the digital domain is very useful. The only penalty of a true scanner is that a scan takes a bit of time. Given the results, it's worth it.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
A little slower 'reading' the image than expected yet film cassettes are simple to load and easy to use. Have yet to fully read the instructions on how to identify and file images but reviewing those retrieved from the hard drive are of good quality. It is going to be a more pleasurable experience to view old photos than setting up a slide projector and screen; sharing, and boring friends, via the PC will be a pleasure.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
I bought this because I was fed up with scanning B&W negs on my old Epson flatbed, which was painfully slow and difficult to keep dust free and almost enough to make me abandon my beloved film cameras. The Plustek is a game changer, it was up and running on my Windows 10 PC in less than 10 minutes out of the box and produces very high quality scans. The software is heavily populated with video clips to help you learn how to use it, but I found everything very intuitive and you can make it easy or complex, up to you. The whole thing is light and portable and comes in a nifty zip up bag, so with this, a changing bag and a laptop I've essentially got a portable darkroom I can take on holiday (as long as I don't try and fly with bottles of suspicious liquids...) The digital kit has pretty much stayed in the bag since this arrived.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
Just replaced my old 7600i + SilverFast6.6 with this 8100 + SilverFast 8. What an improvement! The new software needed some re-learning, but once sussed is easy to use and more flexible than the 6.6. Colour slides and negatives come out very well, thus minimising the need for PhotoScape or the like. I've not yet tried my monochrome negs, but don't anticipate any problems.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
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