Plustek OpticFilm 7200 - film scanner (35 mm)

Summary: After navigating through two other slide scanners, Minolta and Canon, I finally ended up with the Plustek 7200. I am very pleased with the results this scanner gives.
The software
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Summary: After navigating through two other slide scanners, Minolta and Canon, I finally ended up with the Plustek 7200. I am very pleased with the results this scanner gives.
The software is very easy to use for even the novice. I have been scanning my slides with a 7200 DPI resolution, although the program allows one to use a resolution anywhere between 50 and 24,000. With my PC's 3.2 Gig processor and 2 Gig of RAM, the scan takes about one minute, and that includes the pre-scan. I pre-scan the slide, which then gives me the ability to crop the unwanted portions from it. The resulting image is shown to be about 35 Meg, but with the JPEG compression the actual end image comes out about 2-3 Meg, depending on the cropping of the slide, which is a snap with the software. For e-mailing the photos, I simply use a program to decrease image size.
Of course, if you have stored your slides in a sandbox, elimination of scratches is difficult, but dust removal is simply done with a dust-off can product and a $3 blow-brush. This unit is packaged with extra software that I find unnecessary, as I only use the " Silver Fast SE " program. As noted, the user manual is lame; it is a sheet in many different languages, not a users book type. All in all, for about $200, this scanner has outperformed the $500-600 units I have tried and returned in the past.

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Summary: At about ?200 this scanner is the best value for the money. Scanning a negative at full resolution takes it about 2 minutes, yielding a 210 Mb file!
7200 dpi
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Summary: At about ?200 this scanner is the best value for the money. Scanning a negative at full resolution takes it about 2 minutes, yielding a 210 Mb file!
7200 dpi is actually better than the negatives or dias own resolution. Which makes it seem useless having even higher resolution available through software interpolation. Lower resolutions are also available, which i have found very useful. Compared to my old Nikon, this scanner lacks some color resolution in the highlights and the shadow areas of the picture. Snowscapes and other pictures with extreme contrasts are not scanned well!
But overall it is a good buy imho.

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Summary: Produces a 30mb file from a 35mm negative with visible horizontal scan lines which photoshop cannot filter out. The silverfast software bundled with the scanner has no effective noise reduction ...

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Summary: Produces a 30mb file from a 35mm negative with visible horizontal scan lines which photoshop cannot filter out. The silverfast software bundled with the scanner has no effective noise reduction feature. The negatives being scanned reveal no flaws where viewed on a light table. This was a gift - doubt I would have purchased it myself.

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