Plustek Opticfilm 7200i

There were two reasons for buying a film scanner rather than a photo scanner: (i)I had a stack of negatives, but not many original photos, and (ii) after taking a film to be processed I saw that now that they are using digital scanners the aspect ratio of the photo is that of a digital camera (different to a 35mm film camera); so not all the negative is printed onto the photo (plus the colour correction was dire). After a lot of review reading I bought one of these from Amazon - the Plustek Opticfilm 7200i. Two things common to various reviews were that (i) it produced excellent results and (ii) the software is a bastard to set up. Since I'm running Vista, this did me some concern, as Vista struggles just running on its own platform.

So, a couple of days later it turned up, and I connected it up to the computer loaded all the software and then pressed the "quick scan" button, and it worked first time with no problems. The quick scan is a bit basic - it just about shows you what is on the negative, and not much more. Using the "Intelliscan" button I then scanned the negative to Silverfast (which according to every advert comes free with the scanner). The scan was actually very good, but unfortunately this is only a demo version - I scoured the boxes, instructions and CDs but could not find a code, and to buy the version I had looked like being £150 or so. Without the code the software is useless, and crashes a lot.

Undeterred I then updated the scanner driver to the latest version (as advised by an amazon review). Instantly everything stopped working. It took a lot of uninstalls and reboots before I got the original software back on. I wasn't prepared to pay for the full version of SilverFast, so read a few more reviews and came across Vuescan, which at $80 is a lot cheaper. I got the demo version first to see what the scan colour correction on both pristine and dirty negatives was like and it was pretty impressive. It doesn't correct major scratches, but neither did SilverFast (on the few occasions it didn't hang after a scan). The image below is from a very good quality negative, and is uncorrected from Vuescan's conversion (using the correct Agfa film setting). For both examples right click to view full picture.



The next scan is from a 15 year old negative which had seen better days... (again uncorrected from Vuescan's effort, this time using a "generic" film)



So, in summary a great scanner at the price. But, if I had to start again (on either Vista or XP) I would install the driver disc (which also installs Presto! which I've not used at all, so may uninstall) and then test that the quick scan works ok.

I think the instructions say, plug in the USB lead, turn on, then install software (don't upgrade it unless you hit problems), reboot and it will then finish the install - after that put in a negative and test that the quickscan works. If it does, don't install the second disk (SilverFast); instead download the demo of Vuescan and play around with it - it will put "$" symbols over the picture, but for seeing how it works that doesn't cause any problems. If it works fine for you, get the full version (unlimited upgrades) - for £40 it is worth it.