The unit is a black rectangular unit about 4.5″ x 4.5″ x 10.5″. I’m very pleased with the OpticFilm hardware. I checked the reviews, and they were mostly good, with the caveat that there was a learning curve involved, so last March, I bit the bullet, and bought one. I saw some sample images, and they looked good.
I tend to doubt I would have been happy with the quality.įinally, about a year ago, I started reading about the Plustek OpticFilm series of scanners. My mother actually got one for me for Christmas, but it turned out to be Windows only. Every now and then I would desultorily look at eBay to see if they had one I could afford at the moment, and come away empty handed. The only problem was that they were $2000 – $5000 - and no longer available. For the longest time, the only scanner I could find that looked like it had quality I could live with was the Nikon CoolScan series.
This would entail the cost of the scanner, plus my own time scanning and post processing the slides. I may still explore this option for his medium format slides. There are services that do the work domestically, but they’re higher priced-on the order of $3-6 apiece. Aside from the inherent risk of sending them out at all, I’ve read that the lower priced services actually send the slides overseas, where labor costs are lower.