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.

This is about the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 scanner. I am very happy with it. I've used it thus far to scan Kodachrome slides and save the scans to jpeg files.Those I input into Gimp. The scans are very accurate. The ability to crop images prior to final scan is quite handy, especially if you want only a part of a sharp slide -- you can scan at a high precision without using hundreds of MB for the jpeg file. To get started, you need to go to the Plustek website, create an account (you need the scanner's serial number), and download version 9 of the SilverFast scanning software. I floundered a bit, because the instructions for a CD-less Macbook told me to get version 8. That failed because my serial number was only for version 9. Anyhow, I got the software loaded and it works fine.

In summary, it works. However, it slow and very very tedious. Seriously consider using an outside service to digitize your slides and negatives for you rather than doing it yourself, and future proof your treasured photos by making sure to get HDR or RAW scans if at all possible. Note I have 30+ years' experience in digital photography and computer graphics, so I sort of know what I'm doing. Sadly, I also know that I'm also doing lots of things wrong using this scanner, and there is no easy way for me to address these problems by myself. Given my background in photography, I have a zillion slides and old pictures I want to digitize and preserve, so bought yet another scanner to do so. I've started this a couple of times over the last few decades, but always gave up due to lack of time. And after a bunch of years, the old ones are no longer supported on my newer computers or I've lost the software, so I buy yet another one. In this go around, the Plustek OpticFilm 8100. I do have to say, the Plustek is pretty solid and works most of the time. But the scans are slow. At the high resolution I use (after all, I want the best), it takes at least a few minutes per slide. So, I can only get through perhaps 30 or 40 a night. Given I have several thousand slides, this is going to take a bit of time, and I question is it worth it. Ask yourself the same question before buying a scanner yourself. Also, the 'SilverFast' software used to scan is proprietary and licensed locked. Given my past experience with film scanners, I know the drivers will go out of date and hence the scanner will worthless within the next 10 years. It's also licensed, meaning that I had to set up an account on their site to enable it. Given I'll probably change PC's before the decade ends, this means that unless I'm really careful, I'll loose track of the license and end up with yet another boat anchor even before the software goes out of date. As for those drivers - they're not perfect. About 1 in 10 scans, they glitch and I need to restart it. I will say they're less buggy than my previous scanners, but still, you'd think that they'd be bug free by now. (I really do not understand why the USB scanner drivers have any bugs left in them at all after all these years.) The amount of data in each scan, while large, is nothing compared to what the PC can now handle. The SilverFast software is also way to complicated, but not flexible enough. It does have a 'easy' mode, which works well enough. However, it's too easy to flip on some of the more complicated features like dust or colorcast removal trying to get the perfect scan. These aren't at all easy to use, sucking up huge amounts of time just fiddl'n. Probably not worth the time sink, but way hard to resist the urge. Finally, I really worry I scanned the images so they look good on my PC, rather than good everywhere. After all, I haven't calibrated the colors in my screen, the room lighting isn't great, and I'm exactly sure what 'best' is anyway. Hence my overwhelming urge after each long evenings of scanning to just chuck the scanner in the trash and pay someone who knows what they're doing (or at least as done it alot and knows what not to do) to scan my pictures for me. If you do take my semi-advise and get someone to scan your precious pictures for you, ask for RAW or HDR format results, if at all possible, in addition to easy-to-use JPEG or TIFF. These will provide better results. Sadly, normal PC's and software aren't quite able to support HDR everywhere yet. But give them 5 to 20 years - cell phone photography is already driving this support. Hence HDR support will become far more common, and you'll thank yourself you spent the extra cash and time now. The negatives or slides won't last that long to let you scan them again.

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

***Hopefully my image examples aren't compressed, and people can see the optical quality of this scanner.*** One person simply complained that their 30-50 year old slide film images have "weird" colors, well, duh, you probably left your images in a basement for decades, what else do you expect them to look like? The people getting streaking issues, maybe ask for a replacement? Others are whining about "software" presumably, silverfast, being hard to use...Yes, because you're not used to using a simple and straightforward program, once you learn it, it's fine. The images I show are 80% JPG's from Lightroom!!!, Goes to show you the quality of this scanner. I scanned the images as a DNG file, then used negative lab pro ($99) to convert the images. Could I use silverfast? Sure, but DNG's give you better dynamic range, and the files are giant. It does take a while to scan your photos, so it's best to preview the images, and scan the ones you want, same thing you'd do in a darkroom, make a contact print and print 2-3 of your favorite images. This is the same concept. If you're scanning ALL 36 images at full res. When 30 of them are trash, then yeah, it'll take a while. The details at MAX res (7200 dpi) gives you a real world DPI of 3100-3400, which isn't to say that's bad at all, it's quite usable, even for larger prints if you learn how to use unsharp mask in photoshop. I rescanned an image and compared it to a Noritsu labscan. While the Noritsu is slightly sharper, it has a bit more detail and better shadow/highlight recovery and dynamic range. Does it completely and utterly blow this scanner out of the water?.....No. Is it better? Well, yes, obviously, you're comparing a $10,000 scanner to a $350, and that's what makes this plustek so dang good. It's arm wrestling with a noritsu scanner in terms of quality. It'll ultimately lose, for sure, but its the little engine that could. I'd be very confident printing LARGE prints (30x40), after of course, unsharp masking and adding sharpness in post, but frankly, how many of us print 30x40? Chances are, not many. Biggest prints I do in both darkroom and digital prints are 11x14, and this is PLENTY powerful enough for that size. Bottom line, this is a very very capable scanner. The Karens that bought this to scan old family film and are upset over the quality simply don't know what they're doing. Oh, and your epson v600-800? Yeah, this would pound that into the ground. Everyday.

First, let me say that I've had a number of scanners over the years, and I did extensive comparative research prior to purchasing the Plustek 8100. My research indicated that this was likely a very good scanner for the money. After I got the scanner, it seemed true. I had read that the controls were difficult and had a steep learning curve, which was alright for me because I don't mind reading and testing things until they work as intended. For the first three months this scanner did great. In the fourth month everything changed. I have literally tens of thousands of 35mm color slides and B&W strips. The scanner started acting up and after doing about 8-12 scans it would start to fail, showing horizontal bands across the image. I did some research and found comments by Plustek that this could be electrical. I made sure to unplug other devices around it, and I purchased a snap on toroid shield to try to eliminate unintended electrical impulses. This had zero impact. I contact Plustek, and a week later they emailed me to tell me that it could be electrical and that I should make sure no other devices were active near it, and they told me to use the correct cord (I have only used the cord that came with the device). I immediately wrote back and described the defect and my attempts to fix it, and said I wanted to find out about a replacement. That was two weeks ago and they never responded. OK, so I got accustomed to only doing 8-12 scans before it starts to fail and needs to be turned off for 2 hours to recover. Today a new problem popped up. I'm getting a single pixel line through each image. The line is NOT a scratch, and I've heard of other users having this same problem. So now I am REALLY fed up. I have thousands of images to scan (for commercial purposes) and I can't deal with a scanner that is so incredibly temperamental and problematic, on top of which the customer service is seriously negligent. Maybe I have the wring driver? It's impossible for me to know because their web page makes it impossible to actually download and install any update. It takes a lot for me to write negative review like this. They deserve it.

I'm pretty tech savvy and usually have no problems installing drivers and software, but boy were the reviews right about it being a not-so-easy install IF you don't have a CD drive. I did eventually get it to work, but the driver install was alarming for reasons explained below and while the software install was easier, the whole going to this link and trading-your-serial-number-for-a-new-one, etc. just made the whole process a bit labyrinthine. However, my main issue is that this scanner is NOT iSRD (infrared dust and scratch removal) capable and I just didn't realize how practically useless the software-based dust/scratch removal was until a few scans later. This might not be a big deal normally for those of us who often prefer to touch up dust and scratches ourselves in Photoshop (since you have greater control and can 'undo' anything that's weird) but if you plan to scan a ton of old negatives with stuck dust, blemishes, etc. on them no matter how much you try to clean them physically—do yourself a favor and go with the 8200i instead. No matter how good you are at dust removal in Photoshop, doing it manually will still be a time-consuming pain in the neck. The software-based dust removal is OK but it can misread a pixels from the image itself as dust and do weird things—hard to explain but was easy to see in a couple photos. Once I saw this issue, it essentially rendered it useless for me except for maybe very simple photographs with not too much detail on them. Even then, it will still not remove all the dust. 1) Installing the driver (without a CD drive) for this scanner is confusing. I got it to work eventually, the first few times there was no dialogue box or anything happening (nothing to press or do) besides a blue window with the name of the scanner in yellow font. When the installation dialogue finally did pop up (after I gave up and installed the software—which the instructions for no-CD-drive install have it reversed—it states installing the driver as Step 1 then the software as Step 2) there were at least buttons to press but it still eventually got stuck at the blue window. The window stayed open for 20+ minutes (the times before I had to force shut it down). It wasn't interfering with anything (or so it seemed) but still seemed to be doing something, however as stated it's just a blue window with the name of the scanner on it so you have no idea what's going on, and the X (close window) button is disabled during this time. Had to force close it eventually. I was totally frustrated, but I started up the software anyway just to see if it would work and apparently it does. Though I still have an uneasy feeling about the driver install because of that window. There was no "Finished" button or anything. Because of that, part of me is anticipating software issues down the road like other reviews here on Amazon and on online forums. 2) I didn't realize this until afterwards but there are TWO types of dust/scratch removal—software-based and infrared. iSRD (infrared) is not available on the 8100. For only like, $30 more you should get the 8200i which has this. I didn't think this was a big deal until after a few scans of some older negatives; basically the software-based dust removal is useless for me. I tried it a bunch of different ways and just realized I should've gotten the iSRD capable scanner instead. And I don't think Adorama refunds you for just being dissatisfied with a product's performance, unfortunately. The rest is fine, but honestly the dust removal is so crucial when you're working with old negatives. I'll probably get what I can out of this scanner for a year or so, resell it or give it away, and get the 8200i later. Maybe just scan clean, newer negatives/slides with this—if you have dirty old negatives and you're stuck with this scanner like I am, you might have to do some nitpicky physical cleaning of the negative itself which is just absurd when you've got hundreds of rolls to scan. If I could, I would return this and/or trade it for the 8200i but I think I missed my window.

This scanner produces VERY high quality scans for negatives! I absolutely love it. The set up was a little difficult at first but a quick YouTube tutorial had that taken care of! I can’t leave a bad review for that on this product directly as it is a third party photo editing software. The scanner is with every penny! I am attaching a sample image I scanned from a negative using this.