Conan's Cameras: Plustek OpticFilm 7500i SE

Well with all these posts about film cameras it'd only make sense if I mentioned a film scanner wouldn't it?

I was in the market for a dedicated film scanner to replace the Canoscan 8600F that I had been using for scanning 35mm (I just didn't think a flatbed scanner was doing my Leica justice). The Nikon Coolscan V was my obvious first choice and is still probably a better, if more expensive, option. Unfortunately it is a now discontinued product with no manufacturer support, and worse, Nikon never felt the need to write 64-bit drivers for it (luckily for Coolscan owners SilverFast continues to support it).

After searching around for something in my price range I happened upon the Plustek 7500i, and initially it looked promising. I found a couple reviews online for it, and while the usable resolution seems to really only be about 4000dpi instead of the 7200dpi that they advertise, 4000dpi was still what the Coolscan V offered and seemed like plenty for 35mm. The Dmax is reported to be about 3.8 and not the Coolscan's 4.2, but considering that I had been working with a flatbed, I figured I could live with the difference.

The scanner comes with SilverFast's software version 6.5, which I find a little quirky but fairly full featured. The iSRD dust reduction hardware leaves a little to be desired, and I'm finding my old negatives to be far dustier and far more scratched than I had previously been aware of. Cleaning your negatives beforehand is always the best policy anyway. High res scans take awhile to complete, especially if you turn on multi-scanning or dynamic range optimization. I typically use the multi-scan option as it helps eliminate some of the noise that the scanner generates itself, but I've been surprised by how relatively little shadow noise is present in even a single-pass scan.

The scans I've been able to get with this little machine are very detailed and very sharp. I barely need to sharpen the images at all for most purposes. Comparing the Plustek to the Canoscan, the images from the newer scanner are noticeably better, and even after optimizing sharpening a clear advantage still shows in the Plustek scans, this holds true even at lower resolution settings. If you do want your scans sharpened, I'd recommend turning off the scanner's sharpening options as it tends to overemphasize the grain in an image; you can do a much better job in Photoshop. My usual scanning routine is to run USM at a radius of 0.3 pixels at 240 to 330 percent and follow that with another round of USM at a radius of 40 to 60 pixels at 10 to 15 percent (threshold is 0 in both cases).

I can't say that the Plustek 7500i matches the Nikon Coolscan V because I've never been fortunate enough to work with the latter, but I can say is that I don't think there's much more detail left in a typical 35mm negative that the 7500i isn't able to capture. D-Max, scan time, and many other things might be better on the Coolscan V, but I'm pretty sure that the 7500i is capable of meeting and exceeding my current needs for 35mm use, and I'm quite happy with it. One thing to keep in mind is that when we all shot film and printed on traditional photopaper, most people placed a limit to quality 35mm enlargement at about an 8x10 inch sized print, so don't expect your old Kodak Max 800 negatives to be scannable and printable as crystal clear wall sized poster images.

Here's a few examples with different films, but unfortunately Blogger messes up the high resolution files on here, so these are obviously rescaled.