Customer Reviews

Plustek OpticFilm 7200 7200DPI Film Scanner

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

This is a winner! Intalled it and within 5 minutes, I had scanned my first slide. It was a snap. You insert the slide in the holder provided, insert the holder into the slot and push until you feel the detent. At that point, the slide is centered. Click the scan button and it's done. The lighted window on the top of the machine is just a light for you to view a slide you have in your hand. It has nothing to do with centering the slide. The slides easily insert into the holder. ALL of the slides scanned in focus. Results are fantastic.
Operation was so simple that there really isn't much to say about that here.
Here's my story: I had 900 baby pictures on slides. No prints. I thought making slides was a great idea 30 years ago. Now, mold is growing on them. Also, they take up too much room to rent a safe deposit box. I bought three different flat bed scanners and two different setups using an S.L.R. camera to take pictures of the slides. Poor quality. I had spent $1,000+ without a decent result. Finally read about the Plustek 7200. Bought it and now, in three days, I'm done digitizing ALL the slides. Go ahead mold... eat the slide because I have them all on CD's. Still have the original packing so I'm going to auction the scanner to recover most of the cost of the scanner. This is a small sturdy machine. I'm sure it'll scan thousands more slides. I am VERY HAPPY!! :-)
I sent each of my sons a copy of the CD, two in a safe deposit box and two in my home office. We'll never lose those memories. Thank you Plustek I am soooo happy!!!

I'm delighted with this purchase even though I'm aghast to see that it went up nearly a hundred dollars since I bought it last summer. I thought electronics were supposed to be going down in price! But never mind that, I'm not reviewing the price but the product and it is good. I ended up installing a lot of software that I didn't end up using because I wasn't sure about the software interdependencies but once that was all done, I got to work and was soon successfully scanning away. Even though you must (natch) scan each slide individually, you develop a rhythm and it is quite possible to multitask on small things or play spider solitaire whilst working. I ended up scanning nearly 1200 slides and it took me approximately 16 hours (on and off over the course of several days). There was such joy in seeing 50-year-old slides come to life! I messed up a couple of times and put a slide in backwards. Not to worry. You can correct that sort of thing with the viewing software and also rotate those pesky sideways pictures. This was a pricey item, even before the price hike, but I've already got folks lining up to borrow it so I think that it will have been a worthwhile investment (I work on the barter system - a bottle of wine or some cookies in trade). Another thing that mattered to me: I have a pretty crowded desktop and it doesn't take up a lot of space. Plus it makes cool sounds that baffle the cat.

I bought this scanner in desparation to try to save some of my slides. Due to my frequent moves I was not able to store my valuable slides properly and mould had begun to grow on some.
The scanner I found was excellent value for money. It was very easy to set up and use even for a non-techie like me.
The quality of the scanned images surprised me, I did not expect to get such high quality digital images from such a modestly priced scanner.
I am very happy with my purchase and recommend it to any photographer who has slides that need to be archived.

I have a tremendous number of black-and-white negatives that I needed turned into prints (the original photos are long gone), but needed to stay within a budget. My seven-year-old Microtek flatbed scanner still runs great for documents and photos, and I tried using the slide/negative adapter, but at 600 dpi, the results were much less than what I require. I bought the Plustek Opticfilm 7200 and am quite pleased with the resolution, the ease of use and the software. At 7200 dpi, it shows a slight graininess (not unlike using Kodak Tri-X film) but nothing worth worrying about. The software shows options for higher resolutions (at a very high price of disk space), but I haven't tried them yet. The software is designed specifically for the purpose of processing transparencies and has yielded far better results than scanning negatives with my flatbed and reversing them to positive using Photoshop Elements. If there is a downside to this scanner, it is probably the limitations of media size; I could not scan my 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" negatives with it, and I would have to make a special holder for my old 126 and 127 film size negatives to fit the slide holder. Other scanners costing more that $1000 may have better end results, but for the money and for my purposes, this is perfect.

I have about 1500 old family slides to scan. This unit works VERY well and its going much faster then I thought it would. I am scanning about 100 a day while I am working on other things. The resolution is more then enough for any need and the unit installed and worked perfectly right out of the box. For the price it cant be beat. It comes with two slide trays that hold 4 slides per tray. So while I am scanning one I am loading the other. Scanning times are longer for higher resolutions.

One piece of advice, get some compressed air! The scanner is very good and will scan all the hair and other small debris on the slides. I make it a point to shoot compressed air at both sides of the slides and that removes 90% of the dirt that had built up over the last 30 years.

If you are scanning slides with this unit (it also scans film negatives), you can always sell it for close to what Amazon is selling it after scanning your collection.

As always Amazon was great.

After reading all the reviews this scanner had, I was very excited to buy it. Once I received it, I tried all the options, default, auto, fixing, etc and the colors, never seemed to match with the original pictures (that I still have). I kept thinking some setting must be off. In summary: terrible color work, very good job at picking the details.

By chance, a friend of mine had just bought a scanner Epson v500, and offered to lend it to me for a few days. So I went scanning to compare, and to my big surprise, the Epson had no problems to get the right quality/color with the default settings, not tweaking required, and the same speed at 2400dpi of aprox 1min per negative, with the advantage of having up to 12 negatives scanned without human intervention vs 1 by 1 of the plustek.

Then I went comparing them with my old Epson 2400 Photo and to my surprise, the quality at 2400dpi was just as good as the v500, except a lot slower (14 min for 6 negatives).

Thanks to the awesome service of Amazon, I am able to return it and soon will be getting a v500.

I had some difficulty with installation due to overlooking the printer/scanneer I already had attached....that took two frustrating evenings. However, tech suppoprt was great and had me up and working right after the call.

It does a great job on transferring slides to jpeg files. I am very happy with the results. I did not use the accompanying software, I found most pictures were fine with the alterations on Quickscan program. I first scanned them with 1200 dpi but re-scanned them at 2400 dpi for better pics. I also re-scanned some because I forgot to clean the slides prior to scanning and when they are blown up, you can see the dust. I bought a micro-suede dust rag at Office Max that worked great.

Have fun...I am happy with the Plustek

I had several hundred slides to scan, and started my project by purchasing an Epson flatbed scanner.....big mistake. I returned the Epson scanner, and purchased the Plustek 7200 scanner. Software installation was fairly easy, and the instructions that came with the unit were easy to follow. I was able to use the quickscan mode, and the results were fantastic. I tweaked the settings a little, and found that the 1200 dpi mode was best for me.

This scanner has two plastic holders that fit four slides each. The slides fit securely into the holders - feeding each slide holder into the scanner was a snap. If you have a large number of slides to scan - this is the scanner for you. Compared to a traditional flatbed scanner, the Plustek 7200 makes your workflow much easier. Highly recommended!

I purchased the Plustek Opticfilm 7200 scanner because I was looking for a cost-effective way to convert several thousand slides to digital format. I give it my highest recommendation. After you install the Opticfilm software, the scanner works perfectly. I briefly investigated the SilverFast software, but decided to use Microsoft Office Picture Manager instead. Using only the Opticfilm software, this scanner is wonderful. The four-slide tray is a good approach to hand feeding. Slide colors and focus are correctly rendered, and the scanner's default settings automatically crop out slide borders. At the highest jpg resolution (7200 dpi), scans take about 90 seconds per slide, and can easily be manipulated afterwards if you want. To clean your slides first, use a Giottos AA1900 Large Rocket Blaster and a 1-inch Static-Master Brush, both also available through Amazon. I cannot give this package a higher recommendation. This scanner works better than others I have used that cost 4 times as much.

I'm very happy with this product, for the most part. It does a good job scanning slides, and the software is very user-friendly. You can easily rotate slides, and the built-in image correction function is really very good. There is a lamp on the top that allows you to quickly look at a slide without putting it thru the machine and having it scanned, so that you can eliminate slides that you don't want to take the time to scan.
A couple of issues that aren't really problems- the default image type that the scanner uses is .tiff, but when I tried to open the images using Paint Shop Pro, I got an error message indicating that PSP could not open the file type. I've never seen a picture type that PSP couldn't open before,and it can usually open .tiff files. This left me saving the images as jpeg, which was ok for my requirements, but it might be an issue for other users.
The one problem I do find with this unit is that the detents on the sliding tray seem overly subtle to me- it's not that easy to feel it click into place, and many times I've scanned an image only to find that I've only got half of the image on the screen and I have to reposition and then re-scan. I've gotten around this by making little marks on the sliding tray that show when it's properly aligned.
All in all, i find this to be a very good solution to digitallizing all of my old slides, and it's really great to be able to view all of those shots from the past and be able to actually do something with the images!!