Customer Reviews

Pacific Image Electronics PS3600 Powerslide 3600

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought the Powerslide 3600 to scan in about 650 slides taken from 1964 to about 1981.
First: The mac software seems a little buggy. Running in OSX 10.3.5, it quit unexpectedly a few times, said certain settings were not supported (then worked on the second try). Maybe it would work better in OS9?

The printed manual is a little sparse. It tells you how to do a scan, but fails to tell you how to remove the magazine!

The biggest problem I had with this unit was frequent jams. My parents' slides aren't in the best of shape, but even when I deliberately used slides that appeared to be straight and flat without frayed corners, I still got 3 jams out of 50. Sometimes the software recovers from a jam, sometimes it doesn't. When it jams, pulls out the slide feeder from the front, push the green button on top, remove the slide, then push the feeder back in position for the next slide. If you don't move it to the next slide, it will re-scan the empty slide.

Another problem is that the time quoted in the specs to scan a slide does not include prescanning of the slide to determine the crop locations nor does it include the time for your computer to convert the image to a JPG and then save it to disk. Overall, a 3600 dpi scan of a 1.5 inch square superslide took 4 to 6 minutes per slide. It adds up.

This scanner comes with no automatic color correction, dust or scratch removal tools that are performed while scanning. It comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, but that's it. The Cyberview software is really just the scanner driver and nothing more. At least you can install the driver into the plug-ins folder of just about any photo software that supports TWAIN importing. It'll work with Graphic Converter, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc.

A word of warning: clean your slides! Dust, dirt, scratches, fingerprints, are all magnified and painfully obvious when you scan your slides. Use PEC-12 slide cleaner solution with the wipes and blow the dust with canned air. I found a free Photoshop plug in from Polaroid (via google) that works well at removing dust, scratches, and hair from scanned images.

The autocropping feature is unreliable and cut off many slides when there was a straight edge of color that wasn't on the border. Sometimes it seemed to crop for no particular reason. I recommend scanning the full slide and manually cropping each image afterwards since you are going to want to run some sharpness and dust removal filters in Photoshop afterwards.

The scanner is loud at times. Don't expect to sleep in the same room you are scanning if you try to run it overnight. Odds are you won't get through a batch without a jam anyway.

Don't think your 300MHz PII is going to cut it if you are scanning at the maximum resolution. My dual 800 MHz PowerMac took 15 to 30 seconds just to convert and save the scanned file. A slower computer will take even longer. Use a 2GHz or better machine for best throughput.

I rate it a 4 out of 5 because of the little things that slowed me down. It could have used a "tips" page in the manual to get the best out of your scans. That's why I wrote this review.

I agree with most of the review of Eriamjh, and I also rate this scanner 4 out of 5. The strengths of this scanner are 1. It can scan up to 50 slides unattended, 2. The price is reasonable for a 50 slide automatic feed scanner, 3. The scan resolution is relatively high at 3600 dpi, and 4. It is packaged with Photoshop Elements 2 for editing your scans (and you will need to edit). I purchased the scanner a month ago and have now scanned about 1500 slides from 1970 to 1995 in both card board and plastic mounts. All of my slides were in near-new condition, yet I found that the older cardboard mounted slides tended to jam occasionally in the scanner due to cardboard separation. The scanner could have been designed better to circumvent this problem. Also, undoing a jam was not always easy; occasionally the scan stopped because of a "communication error" between my PC and the scanner; and about half the time, after a completed scan of slides, the system would not do another scan without turning off both the scanner and the software (and sometimes rebooting the computer).

With all of this said, the bottom line is a reasonably priced scanner producing high resolution scans that automatically feeds slides most of the time - not bad. The six to seven minutes per scan that was the average on my system was not a problem for me. I set up the slides and went to bed. About 2/3s of the time, all was completed by morning. If the machine had stopped overnight, I simply corrected the problem and restarted from where the problem occurred. Also, I don't mind that the scanner does not do much automatically in terms of scan editing. It does adjust the scan time based on the darkness of the slide, and I found it necessary to edit each scan individually anyway for things like color tint, sharpness, cropping, etc. Photoshop Elements 2 has enough tools for me including the all important filter for removing dust and scratches from the scans.

I have been scanning some older family slides with the PS3600 and have found that slides must be in very good condition. If not, the slide will jam and that is where the problems start. It appears that there was absolutely no thought in the design of the PS3600 as to how to remove jammed slides. There is little to no room to get any type of tool in to help remove jammed slides. Any jammed slide is usually damaged worst in the removal process. I bought a slide remounting kit the day after the first jam. The jamming issue is why I contemplated a 1 rating.

When you have good slides the system works well and I am happy with the scanned results. This supports my rating of a 4 or 5. I averaged my overall rating to a 3. Comments made by others about dust are correct. The system will need some vigilance during the scanning process.

The system is designed to work with carousel trays too, but there are few details available on this option. I sent an e-mail to Pacific Image's customer support and got the following response: "It only supports 2 trays from Braun, all others can damage the unit beyond repair and will void the warranty." The 2 recommended models are Round Tray 100 (3.2) for Multimag - White Mfr # 160632 and Round Tray 100S (2.2) for Multimag Scanner - Grey Mfr # 160649.

I have scanned over 300 slides to this point with only 2 jams and have hundreds (if not thousands) to go! My slides are from the 1960s to present and vary in condition. The 2 jams I've had were not, in my opinion, the machine's fault as the cardboard was beginning to separate on these slides. I found it difficult to remove the jam.

I paid for a 3-year service contract on this unit, but have not received any information or paperwork since purchasing it 4 months ago. Amazon provides an e-mail to contact the service contract staff, which I have just done today. Hoping to get an explanation soon.

Happy scanning!