Now a finished original – ready to be printed, backed up and shared in an instant to friends and family across the globe. Lately I’ve been enjoying a return to film photography.
The more methodical approach, excellent tools and delayed gratification have made the experience immensely rewarding. But there’s been one aspect I’ve felt lacking – scans. There’s a lot of appeal in having a good lab scan your photos at development. Good looking, finished results of adequate quality without doing anything more than asking when dropping off the roll.
#HOW TO CLEAR SILVERFAST 8.8 FULL#
Raw black and white scan with silverfast 6.6 full#įrank recently wrote a good summary of the advantages here (the comment section is also full with insights and experiences).
#HOW TO CLEAR SILVERFAST 8.8 PRO#
Raw black and white scan with silverfast 6.6 pro#Īnother major issue is cost.įor development and scanning of a roll I’ve paid close to €40 at Crimson – my local pro lab. I’ve been reasonably satisfied with the 8 megapixel results but at times I’ve felt that the scans have looked a bit harsh and overly processed. This, as well as the cost and two week delivery time has made me look into alternatives.Īfter looking into lab offerings both locally and abroad I was disheartened. None of the labs were significantly better, cheaper or faster as a whole. However I soon concluded that if I scanned myself I could get my cost down to a third and cut delivery time to days instead of weeks – a compelling proposition indeed. Into a new rabbit hole I went – what scanners are good, how good is the image quality, what’s a reasonable cost, how long does scanning take, and so on. There’s a lot of information out there, but it’s hard to find anything comprehensive that’s not either very theoretical or utterly subjective. Never mind that there’s no clear cut best option when it comes to scanners. The choice instead boils down to balancing a number of advantages against a number of disadvantages. Much like with cameras or phones or cars or toasters.Īfter looking into pretty much every option on the market as well as a bunch of discontinued ones I decided on the Plustek Opticfilm 8200i. It’s a current production dedicated 35mm film scanner.
It’s a compact unit and very reasonably priced. It scans negatives or positives at up to 7200dpi, resulting in huge 60 megapixel files. The main disadvantage of the scanner is that each frame needs to be manually fed and scanned individually. There are three options in the Plustek Opticfilm 8000-line. Raw black and white scan with silverfast 6.6 pro#.Raw black and white scan with silverfast 6.6 full#.