Plustek OpticFilm 7200 7200DPI Film Scanner
by Plustek
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Plustek OpticFilm 7200 7200DPI Film Scanner
Customer Review: High quality images but bad color reproduction
Summary: 2 Stars
I have had this scanner for about two years. I bought it when I started doing film photography as part of a class I was taking at a local college. I had many slides from class, mostly Fujifilm Velvia 100 taken with a Nikon N90 and a Voigtlander Bessa R3M.
The 7200DPI resolution of this scanner is very high. It is almost overkill with 35mm film. The quickscan option is nice and fast and once you get the hang of centering the slides the workflow is quick. Auto crop is pretty much hit or miss, many of my slides were missing detail on the edges. The silverfast software is not as good. The user interface has a pretty high learning curve. Even after playing with it for endless hours, I still can't get it to do anything I want and the scans look as same as the quickscan option.
Mostly, I just want an image file that looks like what my slide looks like. I figured with undamaged perfect slides, this should be no problem. No setting I tried with either quickscan or silverfast could make these images look like they do on the light table. Either the software or the scanner has a problem with proper color reproduction. I would give this three stars except that none of the software is compatible with Mac, which is where I do all of my digital photography (I bought my mac after I bought the scanner).
My biggest problem with this scanner, which is causing me to replace it, is the color reproduction. I have fresh slides straight from the E6 developer down the street and the scanned colors are WRONG. This scanner, by default, produces warm toned poorly saturated scans. Fujifilm Velvia is a very vivid colored transparency film. It looks gorgeous on the light table, yet garbage when scanned. After many tries with this scanner, I'm just gonna give up and buy something else.
Customer Review: Great machine that does the job!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a winner! Intalled it and within 5 minutes, I had scanned my first slide. It was a snap. You insert the slide in the holder provided, insert the holder into the slot and push until you feel the detent. At that point, the slide is centered. Click the scan button and it's done. The lighted window on the top of the machine is just a light for you to view a slide you have in your hand. It has nothing to do with centering the slide. The slides easily insert into the holder. ALL of the slides scanned in focus. Results are fantastic.
Operation was so simple that there really isn't much to say about that here.
Here's my story: I had 900 baby pictures on slides. No prints. I thought making slides was a great idea 30 years ago. Now, mold is growing on them. Also, they take up too much room to rent a safe deposit box. I bought three different flat bed scanners and two different setups using an S.L.R. camera to take pictures of the slides. Poor quality. I had spent $1,000+ without a decent result. Finally read about the Plustek 7200. Bought it and now, in three days, I'm done digitizing ALL the slides. Go ahead mold... eat the slide because I have them all on CD's. Still have the original packing so I'm going to auction the scanner to recover most of the cost of the scanner. This is a small sturdy machine. I'm sure it'll scan thousands more slides. I am VERY HAPPY!! :-)
I sent each of my sons a copy of the CD, two in a safe deposit box and two in my home office. We'll never lose those memories. Thank you Plustek I am soooo happy!!!
Customer Review: Does a good job
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm very happy with this product, for the most part. It does a good job scanning slides, and the software is very user-friendly. You can easily rotate slides, and the built-in image correction function is really very good. There is a lamp on the top that allows you to quickly look at a slide without putting it thru the machine and having it scanned, so that you can eliminate slides that you don't want to take the time to scan.
A couple of issues that aren't really problems- the default image type that the scanner uses is .tiff, but when I tried to open the images using Paint Shop Pro, I got an error message indicating that PSP could not open the file type. I've never seen a picture type that PSP couldn't open before,and it can usually open .tiff files. This left me saving the images as jpeg, which was ok for my requirements, but it might be an issue for other users.
The one problem I do find with this unit is that the detents on the sliding tray seem overly subtle to me- it's not that easy to feel it click into place, and many times I've scanned an image only to find that I've only got half of the image on the screen and I have to reposition and then re-scan. I've gotten around this by making little marks on the sliding tray that show when it's properly aligned.
All in all, i find this to be a very good solution to digitallizing all of my old slides, and it's really great to be able to view all of those shots from the past and be able to actually do something with the images!!
Customer Review: Extremely useful product
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm delighted with this purchase even though I'm aghast to see that it went up nearly a hundred dollars since I bought it last summer. I thought electronics were supposed to be going down in price! But never mind that, I'm not reviewing the price but the product and it is good. I ended up installing a lot of software that I didn't end up using because I wasn't sure about the software interdependencies but once that was all done, I got to work and was soon successfully scanning away. Even though you must (natch) scan each slide individually, you develop a rhythm and it is quite possible to multitask on small things or play spider solitaire whilst working. I ended up scanning nearly 1200 slides and it took me approximately 16 hours (on and off over the course of several days). There was such joy in seeing 50-year-old slides come to life! I messed up a couple of times and put a slide in backwards. Not to worry. You can correct that sort of thing with the viewing software and also rotate those pesky sideways pictures. This was a pricey item, even before the price hike, but I've already got folks lining up to borrow it so I think that it will have been a worthwhile investment (I work on the barter system - a bottle of wine or some cookies in trade). Another thing that mattered to me: I have a pretty crowded desktop and it doesn't take up a lot of space. Plus it makes cool sounds that baffle the cat.Customer Review: Excellent choice for it's purpose
Summary: 5 Stars
I have a tremendous number of black-and-white negatives that I needed turned into prints (the original photos are long gone), but needed to stay within a budget. My seven-year-old Microtek flatbed scanner still runs great for documents and photos, and I tried using the slide/negative adapter, but at 600 dpi, the results were much less than what I require. I bought the Plustek Opticfilm 7200 and am quite pleased with the resolution, the ease of use and the software. At 7200 dpi, it shows a slight graininess (not unlike using Kodak Tri-X film) but nothing worth worrying about. The software shows options for higher resolutions (at a very high price of disk space), but I haven't tried them yet. The software is designed specifically for the purpose of processing transparencies and has yielded far better results than scanning negatives with my flatbed and reversing them to positive using Photoshop Elements. If there is a downside to this scanner, it is probably the limitations of media size; I could not scan my 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" negatives with it, and I would have to make a special holder for my old 126 and 127 film size negatives to fit the slide holder. Other scanners costing more that $1000 may have better end results, but for the money and for my purposes, this is perfect.