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

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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.