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: Inexpensive Easy to use scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my first slide and color negative scanner. Though i have used scanners for documents and pictures since the days of the 80286, I had no idea what to buy to catalog over 50 years of family slides and negatives.
For the price, this scanner did exactly what I wanted, was easy to learn to use. You can scan four slides, or one strip of negatives. You must advance the slides manually for each scan, but the included film holders let you preload. It comes with three pieces of software, once, which i have learned is one of the best named Silverfast SE. This is a fully licensed copy, and I was able to download a software update immediately after registering the included serial number.
Prescanning at a low resolution is quite fast. Editing is simple once you master a workflow. I can scan about 30 to 40 slides in about 40-60 minutes. Once you decide on a specific slide to do a full detail scan on for image enhancement and repair, a scan can easily last 4 minutes for a 7200 DPI (optical) scan. Interpolation allows even higher dpi, though i can't imagine that being necessary.
I was able to use the included twain drive with PaintShop Pro, and their is an included plugin for Photoshop users.
I highly recommend this scanner.
Customer Review: Product performed as indicated
Summary: 5 Stars
After looking at having slides converted into digital images and found the cost to be 25 cents to $1.50 each, purchasing a machine and investing my time was the way to go. I have some 3000 plus slides to convert so I did a little investigating and the Plustek 7200 was a middle of the road product and reasonably priced. Upon receipt, I started to scan slides and have completed about 800 so far and the results have been very acceptable. Some of the slides are very old and the original quality is not so good. Some are very dirty which the scanner picks up. The preview feature helps so that you can clean and re-preview prior to making the final scan. The installation was straight forward and I was up and running in a very short period of time. I have not played around with the many additional software applications provided so I have no feedback on those. The basic slide contract and brightness adjustments and cropping features work very easy and do a level of quality I was looking for. Having never used the more expensive tools in this category I don't have a comparison. If you are looking to save the family slides to digital images and that is your main objective then I would say that this machine works as the manufacturer indicates. good basic slide scanner.Customer Review: Disappointing results
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this scanner hoping to scan film negatives from my 1000's of print photos. I had previously been scanning the prints using a flatbed scanner and was looking for better quality results.
I found the software installation to be very time consuming and the instructions were not at all clear as to what was minimally required to operate the scanner.
Getting the negatives properly positioned in the holder was a chore as the holder hinges at the end and the curl of the negatives constantly worked against my efforts to align the negatives.
I tried a few strips of negatives using default settings and I was amazed to see the size of the image files - >25MB per image at the highest resolution. I hoped that this meant better quality but that was not to be the case as the results were grainy and the color did not match the prints.
Similar results were achieved after adjusting settings and using other negatives.
Bottom line: An expensive product that is tricky to use and yields results that are no better than flatbed scans of print photos. It might work great for slides but I would not recommend it for negatives.
Customer Review: Not The Best Alternative For Me
Summary: 2 Stars
I unpacked the unit with great anticipation only to find out that it does not work with mac computers. Nevertheless, I proceeded to install in my Windows machine - my second choice.
First, I have a big problem with pretentious software installations. Te software that comes with this unit requires complex installation, lengthy unlock keys, and has a non-intuitive interface.
Second, after an excessive long time installing (what happened to "plug-n-play"?) I tried it and the results were very disappointing. The slides (only four at a time) do not come through very clear and there is a need for considerable color/brightness manipulation.
Maybe it works for a lot of people; for me, I made the mental accounting of how much money and time this alternative costs vs. sending my slides to a scanning service. I have about 1,000 slides; at most services, it will cost me between $200-$300 to can them all, not counting how much time I'll save. Also, they scan them at resolutions higher than 7200DPI.
Again, maybe it works great for some, but did not work great for me. I returned it.
Customer Review: Very dissapointing
Summary: 1 Stars
After reading all the reviews this scanner had, I was very excited to buy it. Once I received it, I tried all the options, default, auto, fixing, etc and the colors, never seemed to match with the original pictures (that I still have). I kept thinking some setting must be off. In summary: terrible color work, very good job at picking the details.
By chance, a friend of mine had just bought a scanner Epson v500, and offered to lend it to me for a few days. So I went scanning to compare, and to my big surprise, the Epson had no problems to get the right quality/color with the default settings, not tweaking required, and the same speed at 2400dpi of aprox 1min per negative, with the advantage of having up to 12 negatives scanned without human intervention vs 1 by 1 of the plustek.
Then I went comparing them with my old Epson 2400 Photo and to my surprise, the quality at 2400dpi was just as good as the v500, except a lot slower (14 min for 6 negatives).
Thanks to the awesome service of Amazon, I am able to return it and soon will be getting a v500.