Too good to be true (Plustek Opticfilm 7200i)

Member Name: AndrewPo

Product:	Plustek Opticfilm 7200i
Date:	19/06/08 (340 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very high resolution

Disadvantages: Poor build quality

I bought this scanner about a year ago. It seemed too good to be true. Good quality scanners from companies such as Nikon and Canon etc. had always been very expensive, costing several hundred pounds and yet have lower resolution (dots per inch) than this remarkably inexpensive device (I paid about £150 and I have seen it even cheaper in Jessops although they no longer seem to stock it) At this price level of course there has to be some compromise, and this is build-quality. It really is quite light-weight and flimsy in construction and the slides or negative strips have to be manually clicked through the device in their rather cheaply constructed mounts. No motorised transport here.

The software provided was only available for PC (I mostly use Apple iMacs and Macbooks, but I do have a PC as well) and is easy to use and install, but was quite prone to crashing causing me to have to restart the PC a few times, but the speed was fantastic. My old Canon FS-4000US scanner is so slow taking 10 minutes per full-resolution scan, the Plustek takes a minute. In fact I spent more time fiddling with the slides putting them into the mount than actually scanning. The resulting scans, while slightly noisier than other lower-resolution scanners I have used are wonderfully high resolution. Colours are also perhaps more subdued than the Canon, but of course, a few adjustments in Photoshop or Gimp soon fixes that.

The bad news however is that it turned out to be really unreliable, making some very strange grinding noises and something inside jamming (not sure what, but turning off the power usually fixed it) that became more frequent as time went on, eventually resulting in it being unusable. I returned it and got my money back in full.

Would I recommend this scanner? At this price I probably would if you only want to scan a few of your favourite negatives or slides, but not if you are a professional. I am a very heavy user archiving my full back catalogue of 20+ years of wildlife and travel photography. I've gone back to my trusty old Canon scanner.

Summary: Very inexpensive, good image quality, but only foe occasional use

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