Another day, another question on Flickr that resulted in a brief review. This time, it’s for the PlusTek OpticFilm 7500i Ai film and slide scanner.
In response to James Wu’s question on one of my photos:
In a sentence paragraph or two (or three or four):
I purchased the AI (of the OpticFilm 7500i, the 7500i SE and the 7500i AI), which is a good chunk more than the SE. I’m not sure if it’s worth the extra money, as all you get is a calibration slide and a different version of the client software.
Don’t get me wrong, the scans from this thing are fantastic. The UI slider lets you take the scanner up to 10,000dpi (which gets downsampled by some factor to get rid of any moire etc., you can change this), but it will go higher. There are settings for all sorts of film, as well as a mode for Kodachrome slides, which work pretty good. For when that fails, there are plenty of colour correction tools in the software to get it just right from the scan.
However, where the scanner fails is when you want to do bulk scanning. If you are only planning on scanning a whole bunch of film or slides, do not get this scanner. It is incredibly slow, as it scans each frame individually and has no mechanism for scanning several in a row. Currently I’m managing to scan a set of 36 exposures in just over an hour, at around 3600dpi, though what takes the most time is the iSRD scratch removal.
A word on the scratch removal: It’s really clever. After doing the scan, it runs another scan using infra-red (which shows up any dust or scratches), and then works its magic (which is CPU intensive—faster the computer, the better). Sometimes it doesn’t work, and for those times, there is a traditional dust/scratch removal algorithm, as well as a great clone tool.
Where this scanner is really useful is for getting huge scans from negatives, which is why I got this scanner in particular. I want to get large prints from my negatives, and in the 10,000dpi mode I mentioned earlier, you end up with a file more than large enough to print un-processed on A2 (60×42cm @ 300dpi). In terms of smaller scans for online and small prints, there are in-built options for doing a sharpen/unsharp mask on the way out, so there’s very little post-processing needed.
If you would like to see what a large scan looks like, right-click and download the following link for a 10,000dpi scan of this image (23MB): www.riggzy.com/files/Cripwell.jpg
I hope this helps, I had a lot of trouble getting some good consensus on these scanners. It seems that if you want to batch scan film by the roll at 4800dpi (large enough for A3 printing), Canon’s flatbed film scanners are the best deal. If you want huge scans, the OpticFilm series of scanners seems to be the best. Anything before the OpticFilm 7200i is Windows only, however.
I hope this was helpful! If you have any specific questions just reply and I’ll follow up. =)
-Thomas Riggs
Questions are also welcome here!
Further reading: PlusTek Product Page
