NEWS – If you’re like me, you have lots of film negatives (and/or slides) that need to be scanned and digitized for safekeeping. Plustek recently released the Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai scanner, which contains all kinds of bells and whistles to help you obtain great scans of your film and slides. It’s a professional-grade film and slide scanner that has the following features.
It has five easy-to-use single-touch buttons to start your scans.
It has the ability to scan different types of 35mm film using easy-to-load film holders.
You can obtain an image resolution up to 7200 x 7200 dpi.
It utilizes a “5-element lens system…to reduce light refraction” and capture images with less blurring and distortion around the edges of the film.
It also uses modulation transfer function (MTF), which “quantifies how well a subject’s regional brightness variations are preserved when they pass through a camera lens” (cambridgeincolor.com).
And it uses IT8-2 color calibration to enhance the color accuracy of the scanned film, …
…as well as a “built-in infrared channel and SilverFast iSRD” (infrared Smart Removal of Defects) to remove dust and scratches from scans.
However, I noticed that the scan speed is quite slow. It takes about “52 seconds for maximum scanning area color at 600 dpi”, “360 seconds [six minutes] for maximum scanning area color at 3600 dpi (IR enabled)”, or “approximately 25 minutes for maximum scanning area color at maximum resolution 7200 dpi (IR enabled)”. Yikes! It would take me ages to scan all my negatives at that resolution, but maybe you might want to take your time doing this process, since you are preserving these for archiving and safety purposes.
If you’re interested in performing your own film and slide digital archiving, the Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai scanner might be what you’re looking for. It comes with SilverFast Ai Studio 9 software and has all kinds of advanced tech to obtain archive-quality results, but it isn’t cheap. It’s on sale now for $759.05 at Amazon (normally $799.00).
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