I waited a long time to purchase a 35mm slide scanner. I know very little about photography but love anything technological. My father, long deceased, was an avid photo bug and believed only in 35mm slides. He meticulously cataloged every slide he took. As a gift to my mother, I agreed to digitize his collection but did not want to go with a commercial digital lab because I wanted the pleasure of going through each and every slide. Yes, there is a 400+ page manual that I haven't read it yet but plan to eventually. I watched the very helpful Quicktime videos that accompany each of the basic features as I went (I have the SE version, not the Ai) and they did the job. I use a recent Macbook Pro. After one day of playing with a few test slides, I dove in and started working with my father's slides. I am very impressed with the iSRD function on the auto setting (that's the dust and scratch removal function of the SilverFast software). I tried fiddling with the manual settings of the iSRD but was unable to get any better results than the auto iSRD. Maybe once I read the manual I'll understand that better. Over three days I processed just around 100 slides taken between Dec. 1968 and March 1969 (just a drop in the bucket for my overall project!). While not perfect, the difference between the original slide and the post production digital image (set at 600 dpi) with mostly automated software was remarkable. I have not made prints of anything yet, but I did burn the ones I completed to a DVD and played them as a slide show for my mother. Her expressions were worth the price. The only difficulty I experienced was with some night shots. In these cases where a person was the subject of the shot and the background should have been solid black, the subject of the shot scanned extremely well, but the black background would often scan as red. I tried fixing through color correction, but that also changed the tones of the subject. Overall, this was a small inconvenience for me and probably could be handled much better by those with more familiarity with the software or photography.
Pros: Quiet, Very good auto functions in the software, Easy to get started
Cons: For more serious users the 4-slide manual feed might be annoying (for me, it's no problem), as I understand, it reads ONLY 35mm film (again, that's what I wanted so it's no problem for me), Can't use the IntelliScan or QuickScan buttons on the scanner itself when using a Mac - that part is PC only.
