This film scanner takes a bit of tinkering to get the best results
Bottomline: Decent scans are possible, but it takes a lot of fiddling to get good results
Price: £170
Manufacturer: Plustek
Plustek's Opticfilm range of film (negative and slide) scanners tend to give good results, but it takes a little tinkering to make the most of the scanned images.
The new 7300 is no exception. It's easy enough to use – having install the driver and the supplied Silverfast scanning software, you can scan images to disk or to a program such as Photoshop Elements (not supplied). The Silverfast software is comprehensive and allows a wide range of adjustments and fixes, at the expense of ease of use – it can be hard to figure out which button to press when, for instance.
The scanning guides supplied (into which you slot a strip of negatives or a set of mounted slides) are sturdy and easy to use. But it's too easy to allow the negative or slide to move just a touch, resulting in a tilted image. This can be fixed easily enough but it's still a hassle. Scan times are similar to competing film scanners, but the lack of batch scanning – each frame must be scanned individually – is a problem.
The resulting scans were impressively detailed with good colour balance (again, after fixing in software), but overall we were more impressed with the ease of use of the Canon 8800F.
Bottomline: Decent scans are possible, but it takes a lot of fiddling to get good results
Price: £170
Manufacturer: Plustek
Plustek's Opticfilm range of film (negative and slide) scanners tend to give good results, but it takes a little tinkering to make the most of the scanned images.
The new 7300 is no exception. It's easy enough to use – having install the driver and the supplied Silverfast scanning software, you can scan images to disk or to a program such as Photoshop Elements (not supplied). The Silverfast software is comprehensive and allows a wide range of adjustments and fixes, at the expense of ease of use – it can be hard to figure out which button to press when, for instance.
The scanning guides supplied (into which you slot a strip of negatives or a set of mounted slides) are sturdy and easy to use. But it's too easy to allow the negative or slide to move just a touch, resulting in a tilted image. This can be fixed easily enough but it's still a hassle. Scan times are similar to competing film scanners, but the lack of batch scanning – each frame must be scanned individually – is a problem.
The resulting scans were impressively detailed with good colour balance (again, after fixing in software), but overall we were more impressed with the ease of use of the Canon 8800F.
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