Slide Scanners

Dedicated film and slide scanners

If you have a lot of 35 mm film you'd like to convert to digital, you might be interested in a dedicated slide scanner, which also scans film negatives. While buying a separate piece of equipment might seem like overkill, it could ultimately be cheaper than paying a photo lab to convert years of 35 mm film and slides.

The Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED film scanner (*Est. $1,200) is a top choice among dedicated film and slide scanners, despite its very price. CNET's editors are among those giving this Nikon series a high grade. Because the Coolscan 5000 ED supports multipass scanning, pros can better control grain and other image fine-tuning. Experts say color fidelity is great, and the Coolscan's slide and film scanner is easy to use, with straightforward setup and well-placed controls. The Coolscan 5000 ED uses a special glass lens (Nikkor ED), which in combination with high optical density gives it the power to handle "extreme contrast in both slides and negatives," according to CNET's Jeff Dorgay. The included software is powerful enough to take the place of a stand-alone image-editor and offers advanced options for the expert user. The Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED is PC- and Mac-compatible and is available mainly at specialty stores. It's important to note that Nikon is no longer developing this product or its Nikon Scan software, so you may run into issues when using it with Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.5.x or later, or any 64- bit operating system. See Nikon's support forums for more information.

The Coolscan series is likely too expensive for the average consumer and may not work correctly with newer computers. As an alternative, the Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE (*Est. $360), a dedicated 35 mm film scanner, has received some positive feedback from reviewers. This scanner is available in two versions: the Ai model (*Est. $500), which is bundled with the professional Laser Soft SilverFast Ai Studio software, and the less expensive SE model (*Est. $360), which comes with SilverFast SE-Plus. As would be expected, the professional version of the software provides more options for editing scanned images. The OpticFilm 7600i SE boasts 7200 dpi resolution, although some reviewers report lower actual resolution in tests. Editors at ScanDig are only able to achieve an effective resolution of about 3250 dpi, which they find "acceptable." It also uses an LED lamp like the more pricey Nikon film scanners.

Reviewers all note that scanning with the Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE is a relatively slow process, because each frame must be manually fed into the machine. Also, as the editors at ScanDig point out, loading slides and filmstrips into the spring-loaded holders can be somewhat challenging. However, Shutterbug reviewer David B. Brooks points out that the SilverFast software processes a pre-scan image that allows for correction and adjustment with tools similar to those found in image editors. By having the option to do much of the editing work in the pre-scan mode, time is saved in post-scan adjustments. The Plustek 7600i SE slide scanner also has a dust and scratch removal feature which, Brooks says, "works accurately, so just about all of the slide scans were cleaned by SilverFast iSRD, and I had little post-scan editing work to do."

Mike Pasini at ImagingResources.com says he used the 7600i SE film and slide scanner for several weeks to scan a variety of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides plus some color negatives that had been damaged in a flood. Pasini says the automatic defect removal feature on the 7600i SE worked very well, and "the iSRD module did an excellent job of cleaning up the image without losing detail. The color negatives from the 1970s were not themselves very sharp, but we didn't see the softening automatic defect removal often introduces."

Consumers posting reviews of the Plustek 7600i SE on B&H Photo's site are positive, reporting good scan results. They say they are only minimally inconvenienced by the manual feed feature.

There are cheaper, if flawed, alternatives for those wishing to convert slides and film. Pacific Image Electronics' Memor-ease Digital Film Converter (*Est. $120) and Ion's Film 2SD (*Est. $100) are not technically scanners but specialized digital cameras that take pictures of slides or film. The results are then uploaded to a computer, as with the Memor-ease, or saved onto a memory card, as with the Film 2SD.

But reviewers are less than thrilled with results from these budget models. PCMag.com's M. David Stone notes that the Memor-ease is simple to use, but he finds better image results scanning slides on the Canon CanoScan 8800F and 9000F. "If you're the sort of casual photographer the Memor-ease is aimed at -- happy with snapshot quality (for lack of a better term) and not likely to print photos at sizes larger than 4-by-6 -- you might find the image quality acceptable, if less than ideal," Stone concludes. Likewise, ComputerActive's Anthony Dhanendran says of the Ion Film 2SD that "while the results were good enough for viewing, they were nowhere near good enough for archiving (which requires high-quality copies in case your slide or film collection is lost or stolen). On a big computer screen or a TV there was lots of fuzziness and while colors were good, overall results were poor."

Reviewers are clear in saying that flatbed scanners like the Canon CanoScan 9000F or Epson's Perfection V700 and V600 make better choices for this type of conversion. They can batch-scan slides and negatives (generally about four at a time), while also providing higher resolution (9600 dpi for the 9000F and up to 6,400 dpi for the V700 vs. 4,000 dpi for the Nikon 5000 ED), and they can be used for other scanning tasks once the slide collection has been transferred. A dedicated film scanner, in the words of CNET's Lori Grunin, can become "an expensive paperweight."