Plustek OpticFilm 8300i Ai Film Scanner - Converts 35mm Film & Slide into Digital, Bundle SilverFast Ai Studio 9 + QuickScan Plus, Include Advanced IT8 Calibration Target (3 Slide)

The media could not be loaded. There seems to be a large gap between the cheap film digitizers and the commercial grade film scanners. This is one of the few options out there that gives fantastic results for under $1,000. I'm well within the "amateur photographer" range, so this is really a bit overkill for my needs. Not complaining at all, I am very happy with what it can do. The scratch-fix works well, but it isn't a miracle worker. There is only so much it can do to save the image. If the scratch is severe, it will come through and there's no fixing that. The speed of the machine is great at about 30 seconds per image at 3600dpi. When cranked all the way up to 7200dpi, the scan takes about 3 min. Image qquality is fantastic. You can see the film grain quite clearly when zoomed in, even on the lower 3600dpi setting. The biggest drawback is SilverFast9. It's a hassle to get up and running, and has quite a learning curve. I've never used darkroom or photoshop, so the features on here are well beyond my pay grade. But with perseverance, you can get a preset that you like and keep it there. Alternatively, you can use Plustek's proprietary scan software Quickscan Plus. This offers hassle-free scanning for those less computer savvy. I love the detents for feeding the film through the scanner, and the flaps that keep the dust out when the feeder is out of the machine. Though I keep it zipped up in the protective case when not in use, just to keep it dust-free.Overall, it's a great device for amateurs trying to digitize 35mm photos and professionals who can get the most out of the complicated software. I know, it's a bitter pill to spend $600 on a scanner that only does one format. But the one format it does, it does very well.

I'm not a photographer, but the scanner works very well. I've scanned several hundred slides (and thousands to go), but was up & running quickly, with very good results. Was worried the SilverFast software would be too complex, but they included the "WorkFlowPilot" which made it very simple. Scanning is fast if you do not modify the scan (such as remove scratches, dust or improve the image), and if you do enhance the image, can take over 2 minutes (or more) per slide. Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm very happy with the PlusTek scanner & SilverFast software- it's getting the job done for me.

I have scanned close to a 1000 color negatives and SilverFast works great. Cleans up most of the dust and scratches fine. Bigger ones not so good but I am using the standard setting. Once you get used to changing input histogram settings to get a good output histogram, good pictures can scan much better but bad negs are always bad. SilverFast has settings for a lot of different brands and types of negatives. I did have a Kodak film type 5075 from late 70's that wasn't listed but I picked another Kodak setting that looked good. Sometimes using a different setting than the type scanned can come out better.Using the SilverFast 9 software for black and white negs looks fine on the computer screen but the scanned file looks like modern art, totally unusable. Was going to contact SilverFast about it but just used the QuickScan Plus included software since I had less than a 100 negs.The other problem was slides. On a non-Kodacrome slides it was WYSIWYG. On Kodacrome even setting the settings to Kodacrome they all came out over saturated blue. I manually changed the software saturation settings so on screen it looked unsaturated there , scanned it, and then looked at the scanned file until I got it right. Once again too few slides to bother with customer support.Maybe SilverFast help line could have helped, don't know. I am done with slides and B&W negs.However, you can use the 35mm holder on 126 negatives because they are the height as 35mm. On a 4 neg strip you line up 2 scan them and line up the other 2 and scan them. Worked great on my old 126's from early 1970's.

It was very easy to install the software. The built-in functions for a quick scan are very useful. For added function, I’ve directed the scanner to open my 7200 dpi scans in Camera Raw 2025. The image quality is so high, that you can salvage details even if you need to deeply crop an image. It does take some time for a high-quality scan. At 7200 dpi, I waited for about four minutes.

Tried to use this with an iMac Studio 2022 M1 Max. It was able to scan slides moderately well using the Plustek quick scan software. I tried to scan a wide variety of negatives with very poor results. Uniformly looked blown out like an bad overexposure. No idea how that is possible. I thought that the provided Silverfast software might help, but no. It installed ok but could could not see the scanner: "problem communicating with scanner". Plustek techs were no help at all. Silverfast US tech tried to help but failed. The Silverfast techs in Germany won't answer the phone (at the time specified by the US rep). I gave up after 5 attempts. I really wanted this to work for me and I was willing to accept moderately good results. This was unacceptable and it is now in transit back to Amazon.