Rob Barron
Loves the place
Registered: September 2006
Location: Poole, Dorset
Posts: 5386
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Review Date: Sun November 26, 2006
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £184.00
| Rating: 9
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Pros:
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Versatile, great picture quality
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Cons:
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Slightly big
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I was in the market for a good quality scanner that would let me input both prints and slides to my computer as I had a large job on that needed both. I don't do enough slide scanning to make a slide copier justifiable as they cost double this price and up (for a decent quality one) and I'd still have needed a print scanner as well.
So, is this good enough to be a mix of the two? My answer is definitely yes. I am not saying the slide scanning is absolutely top notch to the level of a £500 Nikoscan or something but that would be unrealistic. The quality this delivers is extremely good and only someone with a keen eye for detail would see much difference.
I'll talk about the film scanning side of things first. The hood contains the light unit which is a bright, well-diffused light across the whole length. This is important or else the slides will be unevenly lit giving lighter areas in some parts... not what you want!
The films that this can scan are pretty impressive: You can put unmounted negative or positive film in and scan up to 12 photos at once. It will separate them for you internally. For mounted slides, you can scan in four at a time. You also get an adaptor for medium format 120 roll film. Whichever you put in, the scanner knows autmatically, nothing to tell it. It even knows the difference between negative and positive film so no extra settings for slides or negatives.
The scanning is impressively fast using a USB 2 port and if you want it can remove dust and scratches. However, I would avoid using that unless you really need to. The way this works is basically a question of cloning out bits but whilst it does a pretty good job of seeing the difference between sut and a piece of fine detail in the picture itself, it isn't perfect so it can leave the picture looking a tad flat. Same for when scanning prints.
Print scanning is a doddle. It will scan up to A4 and does so very quickly. To avoid scanning a lot of empty space when you scan a small picture, it is best to do a preview scan first. This takes all of 2 seconds! This allows you to then adjust a frame around what you want scanned and it will just scan that part. This is also good if you had say a picture in the middle of a magazine page and don't want to scan the whole page and then crop it out.
Resolution-wise, the quoted max res of 3600 x 6400 dpi is extremely impressive but tremember this is for slides, not for prints. Frankly scanning at that res for prints would take ages and would give you a picture where every fibre of the paper it is printed on would show! But the resolution for prints is still as powerful as you would ever need. Remembr, these figures are not interpolated, they are optical so every pixel really is captured, not just made up by software as in cheap scanners!
It has extremely user friendly software allowing you to make adjustments before you go ahead and print for real if you want to or you can scan, then make adjustments and then save the results. Personally I just scan and save and make any adjustments in Photoshop. It has 4 programmable buttons which are very useful. You can set it up so that you effectively have a colour photocopier: Just press Copy and it will do it all for you: scan the picture or page of text or whatever in and then print it out (more than one copy if you want) without you needing to do anything at all.
You can set up for different resolutions of scanning, mono or colour, etc. You can also have it scan and convert straight into a pdf file, very handy at times. You can have it scan and send the result in an email but I've never tried that yet, not something I would really need.
It has an impressively wide and accurate colour gamut but even more importantly, it gets details right down into the shadows. If there is detail in the picture, there will be detail in the resulting scan. A lot of cheaper scanners have a lot of very dark areas and don't give this kind of results so are not much good for high quality work. This one most certainly is.
I have had mine for about 18 months now and the fact it is still on sale shows what a good scanner it is. I am not going to be changing mine any time soon as this works so well I see no need at all. If you want a hybrid scanner that really can do a good job of slides. negs and prints and don't want to pay a king's ransom, this is the one for you :o)
Cheers,
Rob
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ive been working it hard for the last 7mnths and it just keeps going with no proplems ( my fingers being the only true proplem 
) have scanned 35 & 120 negs both B/W & Col
ive not seen it any colour scans ive done so far..being a old film buff i ask a lot from scanners so quality ver $.. this unit performs very well ....the only thing to improve it would be a lens system that the bigger model has but of course that does jump the $ up almost double in some cases 
..well thats my tuppence for now my recommendation is " By IT " very well worth the $ it wont let u down and the results are great ( make it a rainy day project.
" need to know more feel free to contact me through the web site " cheers for now ..... Murray