Plustek OpticFilm 8100-35mm Negative Film/Slide Scanner with 7200 DPI and 48-bit Output. Bundle Silverfast SE Plus 9, Support Mac and Windows

I am quite satisfied with this product. I was debating whether to get the Kodak Slide N SCAN scanner or the Plustek OpticFilm 8100. I am glad that I chose the Plustek for its scan quality (higher resolution) and flexibility (more adjustments and control) over the Kodak.This product was very well packaged. It comes with good installation structions and user guide, both quality prints and online video (via YouTube & QuickTime).The scanner itself looks and feels well built. The software (SilverFast 8.8) provided (on CDROM, or can be downloaded) is not difficult to installl. Once you have gone thru the user guide (I watched the online videos), you can master its usages after a few test runs. I found the software fairly easy to use and quite powerful to get the scan results you need. For each key program function or control adjustment, you can click a menu button to open a PDF help document or QuickTime tutorial movie to show you how to use it. I found these very helpful.I have used the scanner for about a week now, had scanned over 100+ film negatives (40 years old) into JPG files for restoration and safekeeping. I am very delighted with the results. For each film, I can adjust the scan resolution, sharpness, contrast, color etc. controls manually, or use the Auto Image Optimization feature of the software.One nice surprise for me is the Dust and Scratch Removal (SRDx) function of software. It removed these impection automatically, once I had set the Detection level and Tile size that I want . I thought I will need to buy the more expense model that has a built-in infrared dust/scratch detection for it to work. The OpticFilm 8100 works just fine without it.Overall, I am very happy with this scanner. It produces high qualiy film conversion into digital media. The only wish I have for it is a faster speed. With scan resolution set at 3600dpi, it takes 2-3 minutes to complete each scan plus the file generation.

The most important thing is that this can produce excellent quality scans from 35mm slides and negatives, beyond just the level you'd need for web-type uses. I typically scan at 3600 PPI and 300 DPI, which yields the potential for print enlargements up to approximately 11" x 7.5".I am saving to TIFF format to avoid compression artifacts. The best results for this are obtained by a process that scans the frame of film twice to try and improve contrast, albeit at the cost of taking roughly double the time to scan a frame. And, at this resolution, we're not talking speedy scans. Because this is a one frame at a time scanner, you also can't just queue up a batch and go do something else. (Having a book available to read while scanning helps immensely.) You can always use lower resolution if you are just trying to scan something for web use or similar, of course, but I am trying to get something as close to on par with the original negative as I can get, albeit with the tradeoff of file size (a bit over 20 MB per frame) and scanning time.The scanning software has profiles for various film types, so it can do a basic level of color correction for the film itself, which is helpful. It can also do lots of other tricks (e.g. dust removal), but at the tradeoff of extra processing time, some manual setup needs to account for differences between frames, and so on. Quite honestly, I'd rather do that sort of thing in Lightroom later since I can do it selectively for images I need at a given time, when I can spend more time optimizing for the images and my needs.There are a few areas of frustration, both related to ease of use:The first is with the negative carrier, which can make it hard to align frames, especially when negatives are bowed a bit in the center. There isn't anything like sprockets to fit in the negatives' holes to help on that front, and I fairly frequently have to try a few times before I get things right with any given strip. The other is with the software in general.The other is with the software. There is some inherent complexity due to the strong features of the software. There are some "simple presets" (for lack of a better name) that nominally make it easy, but, in my experience, those produced completely unacceptable results, so I am configuring the options that make the most sense for my needs. While there are links to videos that can help explain things somewhat, and some independent YouTube videos that can be useful for getting ideas, there are still areas that are tough to fathom. Beyond that, though, there are some areas where you make one change (e.g. asking the software to automatically set the frame size based on a pre-scan), and it changes other things, too (e.g. the file name you'd set up, which it changes back to a default). That's just one example, but there are other areas as well, such as relating to color correction (beyond just the film profiles). Ultimately, I just resolved to try to work around the application's quirks as best possible, for example reframing each shot manually to work around the issues when the software does it. (At one point I considered trying to find another scanning application, but I didn't actually have time to do a lot of scanning at that time, and my research wasn't turning up anything truly obvious. When I finally got back to some more scanning, I didn't want to spend time researching other applications.)The bottom line is both the scanner and software are quite competent, even if there are some ease-of-use frustrations