13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Good scanner for slides with appropriate post-processing
Date of Review: Feb 16, 2006
The Bottom Line: Experts can produce excellent results from slides. Post-processing is necessary. Negative film did not deliver acceptable results.
I was able to get high quality scans from slides out of this scanner. I was not successful in scanning negative film at reasonable quality. Scratch and dust removal is not included, which proved especially bad for negative film. Scans from negative film proved to be extremely pale or faded, the colors were far off, and trying every possible setting in the software did not really improve the situation. I have a suspicion that this may have been caused by the specific model I have, because otherwise no company would claim this to be a negative film scanner. On the other hand, I was able to scan slides successfully, which makes it less likely that I got a lemon. Since I am not so interested in negative film, I have to leave this aspect to other reviewers.
For slides, I was able to create excellent quality electronic reproductions of the originals. I did not scan beyond 2400 dpi because my slides showed significant grain even at this resolution already (the scanner is not a fault). The results were about 7MP scans, comparable to excellent digital cameras. Caveat: the quality of the scan right after scanning was disappointing, creating somewhat faded looking scans.
The faded looking scans (I did not use any of the automatic correction tools provided because they didn't really create corrections that were acceptable to me) had one big advantage: They were scanned at excellent color depth (48 bits) and thus contained the light and shadow details implicitly. All slides were perfectly in focus, no matter of film brand, curling, etc. Scanning time at 2400dpi was around 50 seconds, allowing relatively smooth mass scanning. Dust an scratches were a small problem if negatives were not clean thoroughly by air.
Nevertheless, the resulting scans needed a bunch of postprocessing to be truly acceptable: I used the Polaroid Dust and Scratch remover to clean many of the images, and used ImageMagick as a batch conversion tool to properly adjust the dynamic ranges of the pictures and to sharpen them electronically. This resulted in stunning images, with the only problems resulting from aged film (cracks, discolorations), and not from anything related to the scanner.
The scanner seems to be an excellent choice for somebody who wants to get great quality scans at a reasonable price. The downside is that great expertise is required to create excellent picture quality. Therefore, casual users may want to look at other products, although you may find the scans acceptable as they come from the scanner. Not everybody is as picky as I am.
I would give the scanner a good rating for slides, maybe an 8 out of 10. Again, please check other review to see whether negative film can be really successfully scanned with this scanner.
