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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
Excellent product, let down slightly by the Silverfish Software. To get the best results, and access to all the software features, you need to invest in the Silverfish Studio edition software. Some anomalies with the software, so needs some trial and error, eg. sometimes when using IR scanning, dust and scratches are not aligned with image, so do not auto-correct, but flipping the image in software then aligns them. Manual re-alignment of the IR scan is available in the Studio Version of the software.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
There are better, bigger and considerably more expensive film scanners on the market. For its size and quality, this unit is to be recommended. There are two pieces of software to install: the drivers and scanning control. This version comes with the very good SilverFast scanning software (download the latest version.) The many scan control settings can be quite daunting at first, but you will soon discover what they do. The choice of resolutions is a bit limited and mine will not save in jpg format for some reason. There does not seem to be a way of focusing the image to compensate for different thicknesses of slide mount either. The negative - colour of black & white is good. On the whole I am pleased!
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
I'm using SilverFast9 (paid for separatley but glad I did) to run it, which was easy to install, works seamlessly, and gives good results. Not hard to use if you know how to deal with digital photo files, and the trainng videos for Silverfast are useful. Getting great results for negative scans, and decent ones for transparencies although the limited dynamic range of transparencies makes optimising the scan a bit more tricky. The IR dust removal is working brilliantly - an essential feature that I'm surprised at (in a good way) and really value (esp as we all have some pretty old negs and transparencies that have collected the odd dust etc!
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
I unboxed the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i and had the basic software installed in 5 minutes. I didn't bother with the bundled SilverFast software. Ten minutes of reading and playing around with settings and I was away scanning old 35 mm slides and negatives with excellent resolution. The 2400 dpi setting (24 bit colour) gave me 1MB jpg files that were more than enough for my needs. The device will scan up to 7200 dpi and 48 bit colour but the files are over 100MB and my original photos aren't sharp enough to be any benefit. The colour reproduction is excellent. Build quality is robust and sleek. It all fits neatly into the provided canvas bag.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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