Customer Reviews

Microtek ScanMaker i900 Flatbed Scanner

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I wanted a scanner that would scan any size film negative and paper too, but did not want to to pay a million bucks for it-This is the one! I know an antique dealer who gets these glass negatives from sales and estates and I have been able to place 4 of them on the pull-out drawer and scan them with great results. I have also scanned some old negatives from film cameras from the 1920s and 30s. The scanner has a large platten (legal size) for doing paper and a drawer like platten that pulls out from the bottom for doing slides and negatives. There are several inserts that will accept the different types of media. I have found that the 8x10 glass drawer is the most versitile and easiest to use.

The i900 comes with 2 different software packages for both Mac and Windows; Scan Wizard Pro, and Silverfast, professional scan software. I installed both of them but so far have found it easy enough to stick with just the first one. It has a very intuitive interface and I have had no problems at all. The "Digital Ice" technology is interesting and effective but it is slow- I have found it just as easy to do a regular scan and repair the photo myself in photoshop.

The only thing that might count against this thing is it's size- It's big. And it's heavy. It's dimensions are 15"x22"x6" and it weighs 30 lbs. So if a small footprint is something you have to have, forget this baby.

Installation was a snap- my Mac just loves my new scanner- and so do I. I'm real glad I bought it.

I loved this scanner, to a point. I shoot a mixture of 35mm and medium format film. This scanner looked like the ideal solution, it didn't cost nearly as much as a dedicated medium format film scanner, it allowed me to do glassless scanning of negatives and still allowed me to scan 35mm, other transparancy sizes *and* documents.

All was well and good till I checked out the medium format film scanning tray. It has 4 places to load my medium format negatives, unfortunately, these are only big enough for a maximum of 1 6x6cm negative each. For negatives I don't know any photographers that cut their negs into individuals, they usually keep them in strips of several negatives.

Well, if you're using the i900 you are going to have to cut your negatives out of their strips. Also note, this tray isn't really a "medium format" tray as a generic term, it's really a 6x6cm only tray for 120/220/620 film. If you shoot 6x4.5cm you might be able to make due, but you simply won't be able to scan your 6x7, 6x9 or 6x17 film with this scanner. Microtek support tells me that have no intention of make a good medium format tray for this scanner, so... I sold mine on one of those huge auction sites.

I'm thinking of using the money from my auction to buy a Mictotek i800 scanner which will do 6x17cm negatives, which means it will allow scanning of strips of medium format film. I need to make sure that will be enough.

If you will only be scanning documents, 35mm negatives, 35mm slides or 4x5in. film, this scanner was a beautiful system and I would have kept mine if only it dealt with medium format film.

I've been waiting for this scanner for months and months but it has been worth the wait. I had it on pre-order and have finally got the opportunity to get it. I was eyeing the Microtek 6800 for quite some time but decided to hold out for a legal sized scanner that also had positive and negative capabilities. I was also impressed with the price point of $599 MSRP. I was expecting it to push $799 or more based on the speculated features but was pleasantly surprised when the vendor told me.

With that being said I received the scanner yesterday and immediately torn into it. I am impressed with the physical construction of the unit. The scanner has metal railings inside and is quite solid. Nothing appears cheap or thrown together and I appreciate knowing that its not just plastic that was formed together last week. The scanner is both firewire and USB 2.0 so I chose to hook it up via firewire as most of my USB ports were tied up with PDA, Printer, Mouse/Keyboard, Smart Card Reader, etc. Installed the ScanWizard Pro software, restarted the computer and turned on the scanner. Windows XP picked it up and I was able to do a Scanner Test to verify it was working within a few seconds.

Once the scanner was up and running I launched Photoshop CS and then ScanWizard Pro through the File menu. Once it was up I imported my ICM profiles for my monitor and printer. This allows for accurate color reproduction but is not necessary depending on what you are doing with the output. I was very impressed with the time it takes to actually scan. About 10 seconds or less for a preview.

As for the actual scans I was pleasantly surprised. I have a dedicated slide scanner but it doesn't do large format items. I bought a piece of anti-newton ring glass and used it to flatten my items between the 8x10 glass plate that is included. This insures that the image is completely flat while maintaining the benefits of the i900's glassless positive and negative scanning. Scanning at a modest 1200 PPI I was surprised at the quality that I got. Reflective scans of course came out even better. I for one am very impressed with the optics of this unit.

As for the main feature, Digital ICE I can honestly say that this too is superb. I've read online how Digital ICE used to take almost half an hour to accomplish, this scanner does it in roughly a fourth of that time. The images that Microtek has online appear close to what I am getting with the i900. It saves me a considerable amount of time inside Photoshop and on the three photos I've tried they required little to no cleanup work beyond Digital ICE.

All in all I'm very pleased with my purchase. This will compliment my Artixscan 4000 quite nicely. I couldn't have asked for more and it delivers on everything it promises!

I was looking for a scanner to help me archive 20 years of slides, negatives, reviews, newsclippings and then archive these to CD. I received this scanner yesterday and it was up and running in less than 30 minutes.

Other than it being LARGE (Legal size flatbed)- and has some noise (whirs, clicks), the scans are fast, the software is easy to use, and the auto correction features in the Microtek, & Silverfast software is easy to use, robust.

I was able to batch jobs, import into Adobe Elements for touch ups, and completed 36 slides in about 40 minutes.

The only down side is that the scanner comes with older versions of Adobe Elements 2.0, and Album (really old, 1.0)

But considering the age of the slides and photos, this is doing a terrific job.

I've had my ScanMaker i900 about a year now, and I couldn't be happier with it. It set up easily -- plug it in, load the software, restart, and go -- and has worked beyond expectations ever since. The only glitch occurred the first time I upgraded my Mac to OS 10.3, but once I did a quick search online and found an appropriate Microtek updater, it was golden again. I have since updated to OS 10.4.7 without any problems, so it was clearly just a typical software update situation.

What I like most about the i900 is that it does so much for so little cost. I and others in my small company use it to do normal flatbed scans, but we also handle a lot of slides, transparencies, and filmstrips -- client photos, newspaper microfiche, old archival shots, 1960s cartoons, and more -- that we've been able to scan easily and beautifully with the included multi-size scan templates. And I love that the scanning bed is large enough to handle "oversized" images that many scanners sold today simply can't handle. (I searched 8 stores for one this large, but most only carry the little 8 1/2 x 11 scanners today.)

I use mine for my small business, as I mentioned above, so at less than $600, the i900 is a GREAT deal. It has more than paid for itself many times over. This is especially true because many weeks it gets heavy, heavy use and just keeps coming back for more.

One suggestion is that, if you use it with Photoshop, set up your system so that the i900 is turned on before you start up the computer to which it is attached. Otherwise, it may not be detected by Photoshop and you'll have to restart. This is not an i900 problem, though - it happens with all scanners - it's simply the way Photoshop detects outside devices. Just follow my suggestion and it should work fine - always does for me.

I purchased my Microtek i900 in August 2005. This week it decided not to turn on. I may have used to copy 250 pages or negatives in this period of time. I contacted the service department for Microtek who send you to an online repair service that will give you an email response in 48 hours. Turns out that the unit that I paid over $500 for is out of warranty and there is NO repair service for Microtek in the United States! The only thing I can do with the unit is junk it. Amazing waste of good money to make 250 copies. They do offer you a telephone number to call to get a "discount" on another i900 or upgrade to another Microtek unit. Why would I bother with no repair service available. I understand that when your unit breaks, they will give you a refurbished replacement. No Thanks!!! Never Again....

The price-performance ratio of this scanner is extraordinary.
The reflective (flatbed) performance is great, and the "bonus" of having various glass-less negative / film scanning inserts is great. Having Digital Ice available in scanner firmware is another plus. I'm still trying to figure out if there is software or firmware in this bundle to compensate for film / slide curvature focus variations. What that means so far is that I'm not getting the focal crispness I want from 35mm negative filmstrip scanning ~ I think due to focal length variations in the slight curvature of the negs. I COULD scan them on weighted glass, but that loses the "glassless" sharpness advantage. So far that's the only puzzle I haven't seen handled, but I'm still in a moderately high learning curve. SETUP of this scanner was also highly superior. And amazing build quality. Thanks Microtek.

I purchased this scanner to complete a project of scanning a large collection of my grandmothers slides. I wanted something with good quality and the ability to scan multiple slides at a time. The reviews I read on this product both here on Amazon and also other independant reviews on the web were very good so I decided to give it a try.

I must admit I should have read the specs on size a little better to know what I had coming. It was delivered to my neighbor's house while I was out of town and when I returned they knocked on the door and told me that my package arrived but that it would take two people to carry! It was more because of the size of the box needed to safely ship it, but it was much larger than I expected...definitely not the small footprint desktop scanners I was used to.

If you have only used consumer level scanners in the past like I had, be sure to allow yourself plenty of time to learn what works best for the various settings, etc... It took me a couple days to really get the hang of it but once I did I was able to scan over 500 slides at a very high quality in a few days. Even with the ability to load multiple slides in the tray at a time the scanner still treats each one individually with regard to most of the settings and does a full scan separately for each image.

The output quality was amazing, just make sure you have plenty of storage space because at the highest resolution settings you can easily get file sizes over 30MB from a slide. Larger orginals produce even larger files. I scanned directly to a 400GB "My Book" and it worked great. I was able to play back the scanned images on a projection screen for my family to watch with almost the same pristine quality that the original slides had. Only a true professional or avid amatuer would have been able to see the difference.

A few other tips...be sure to have a good anti-static photo brush and possibly a can of air to remove all traces of dust from your originals and the scanner glass.

I'm thrilled with this product and even more thrilled that I was able to preserve some very precious images at a fraction of the cost of having them scanned professionally!

I bought the I900 in order to be able to scan negatives, slides and transparencies- as well as reflective items on the scanning bed's larger size scan area. The item arrived in a box the size of a coffin but fortunately most of that was due to packaging. The scanner itself is indeed quite a bit bigger (and much heavier) than conventional scanners, but the size is more manageable than the packaging might indicate. This is a solidly built machine. Here are the pros and cons.
Negatives:
The unit's software is extensive and very difficult to make sense of. There is almost too much of a good thing with various discs for support photo programs accompanying the machine. It's hard to distinguish which of these will be useful for the average consumer, so the tendency is to load them all. The primary software that the unit works with is ScanWizard- and like other Amazon reviews indicate- it was a problem to load. Numerous attempts had to be made, each time uninstalling and reinstalling the program before it finally got going. There is also a mind boggling amount of reading you have to do just to figure out how to get the basic functions working. Like most products, the instructions are overly simplistic and you have to have a good deal of patience to get through them. The unit is also a bit on the noisy side when the scanning does take place.
Positives:
Once the unit gets working, it has an amazing number of great features including a clever sliding tray that allows you put in either slides, film strips, negatives, etc. Working in conjunction with the Adobe Photoshop Elements program you can get some great scans, though it you want top quality the scans take a while. I was very pleased with all of the transparencies I had scanned and the Adobe works as a suitable and more simplistic method of fixing flaws in the photos than does the complicated repair software that comes with the unit. The larger size scanning bed is also a big plus. Overall, a great value for the money- just understand that you have to devote an entire afternoon to get the basics working!

The quality and clarity of scans is excellent for a mid-range flatbed scanner. The options to scan reflective, photo negatives, and transparencies of all sizes made this an attractive purchase. The cover can also be raised for book scans. But it seems interminably slow, even though it will do background scanning, the wait time is excruciatingly slow. Rather than asking it to auto correct which takes even longer to process, I export the scans into Photoshop to make the necessary adjustments. Also the crop tool is quite cumbersome compared to Umax's lowest level scanner. Nevertheless, the ScanMaker i900 is a solid, sturdy flatbed, but oh so slow!