Features:

  • Speed and ease of use for quality negatives and slides scanning
  • 7200 dpi resolution / 48-bit color depth
  • 64-bit hardware and software support
  • SilverFast SE Plus 8 software bundled
  • Two one-touch buttons make scanning easier and more efficient for sharing on websites such as Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, etc
A good scanner with a good price

This scanner has an impressive array of pre-scan tweaks that might eliminate any need for post-scan editing, however I still prefer to handle this post-scan. There was a bit of a learning curve in selecting scanning settings, but once I got past this, scanning was pretty simple. The documentation that came with the printer was good.

It offers amazing scan quality

Loving this scanner so far! It offers amazing scan quality. Way better than a similarly priced flat bed scanner. It does its job and it's well worth the money! The size is small, and it comes with a case to keep dust away. You should expect to take your time with scanning though. It's not fast, but if that's a concern, take your film to a photo lab. With this, you have complete control of the scanning process. My local lab charges $20 per roll for hi-res scans, so this pays for itself after I put through 15 rolls or so over a couple months. Note that this version does not come with the dust-removal software, but it doesn't work with black&white film anyway, so the extra feature of the 8200 version was not worth it for me. Highly recommended - if you are serious about your scans, you will love this.

I love this scanner

I love this scanner! It's very easy to use. No more contact sheets - It saves me a lot of time and money renting a darkroom. You can run into problems with dust particles at high resolutions, which requires some editing post-scan, but I have learned to minimize with using a camel brush & air blaster.

Great Scanner and great customer service.

Great product. Getting the Silverfast 8 to work with the latest Mac OS took a call to Plustek. They fixed my problem. Great service nice people. Now I am scanning my large collection of 50year old slides! Great fun .

Plustek OpticFilm 8100 35mm Film Slide Scanner - Great product!

I would agree with most of the other reviewers that this is a great product for the price. I had tried a couple of other less expensive products and was very disappointed in the quality of their scans. They were very slow and showed film grain, a bubbly type of grain like shiny bubbles. The OpticFilm 8100 scans showed none of this type of bubbly grain, and no more normal grain than a colored print would show or even less. For my personal application it is a good fit. My use is mostly for viewing on computer screen or in PowerPoint presentations, not for making prints. I was very happy with the resolution of the scans on negative film using different brands Agfa, Kodachrome, Ectachrome etc, and the colours were acceptable. I don't have a need for batch processing film when scanning and as far as their scratch and dust removal, I use PhotoShop. So, I haven't tried their own software for fixing scratches, but I might give it a try some day when I have spare time. I once used one of the huge commercial Kodak PhotoCD scanners that scanned a slide or negative frame in 4 to 5 seconds at a maximum capability of about 3000 dpi, which is less than half the resolution of this tiny scanner. The Kodak scanner cost over $300,000 back then (1990's). We've come a long ways in technology. This scanner isn't that fast, but it has better quality, and the speed is certainly not so slow that I would reject it for my own application. For the price and quality I'll keep it.

This is a good one

So far I have scanned 700+ negatives and it is working great. I like my Plustek scanner. It is sure nice to have "Old" negatives turned digital. One thing that could be improved would be how the negatives are loaded into the tray. The tray could better "trap" the negative in place as some of my film is curly. All in all it is a GREAT buy.

It's worth the money.

This thing works really well on my older iMac. So I imagine it would function just as good on windows pc. I did take some time to get the negative placement down so that they were not backwards. Very impressive machine. It takes time but I think it works very good and I am very satisfied.

but I am very pleased so far

I have used the scanner for only a few days, but I am very pleased so far. The scanner itself seems to be of very high quality, and the included Silverfast scanning software is very capable, with a lot of options, but a significant learning curve. This may not be the ideal scanner for scanning thousands of slides, because the scanning process is so slow, but the quality is quite excellent, as are the options for editing and repairing images.

PROFESSIONAL QUALITY

Purchased this after some horrible results from an outside vendor. Real pro quality and the software is exceptional as well. Also recommend a second set of trays as you can prepare for the next batch. Although it's a bit slow, the quality is well worth it. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Just What Was Needed

We're having a blast transferring over carousel after carousel of family slides to digital with this unit. (It's a gift for my parents) We're very impressed with how sharp the scans are coming out, as a cheaper unit we had tried a year ago gave us horrible results. Note that this is a lengthy process. It does take time to blast each slide with some canned air, scan in each slide, and make color adjustments if needed, as well as time to laugh at the old hairdos and clothes. The software to edit the color to bring the pictures back up to modern standards is a bit clumsy. We actually decided we liked the vintage look the slides had with the unretouched colors, and are pretty much just scanning those suckers in without bothering to perfect the colors. If we have a great pic that we really really want to maximize, we'll just edit the color on that one. I would highly recommend this product for family use, but if you've got hundreds of carousels instead of two dozen, I'd suggest going with a much more expensive and faster unit. I highly suggest some kind of canned air to remove dust and maybe a second slide carrier so that you can prepare the next set of three slides to go in while the first three are scanning. I do wish we'd bought one used...we will only use ours for a couple months and then never need it again.

Full Reviews