It’s a neat little unit about the size of a box of facial tissues. But hardly anybody makes them anymore.) Like all film scanners, the 8200 Ai is equally adept at scanning negatives and slides.įine Detail: Scanned at 7200 dpi, the digital version of this image has enough resolution to show the grain from the original Ilford HP5 black and white film that it was taken with.
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(The best scanners are generally agreed to be drum scanners, which use photomultiplier tubes rather than CCDs.
![can i save photos from a plustek scanner can i save photos from a plustek scanner](https://fh.lib.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/plustekopticbooka300.jpg)
Its image-sensing component is a charge-coupled-device (CCD) combined with an LED light source. In between are Plustek and Pacific Image, whose competition for the middle ground has produced remarkable value.Īvailable now in stores for about $430, the 8200 Ai can scan at 7200 dots per inch-high enough to show the grain in a photograph, no matter how fine-grain the film is. At the high end, Hasselblad offers scanners with prices ranging up to $25 000. At the low end, companies like Pana-Vue, ImageLab, and Wolverine offer bare-bones units capable of a basic film-to-digital conversion for as little as US $80. That left fewer than a dozen companies competing in the market for 35-mm film scanners. Last, and not least, with your photos in the cloud, you need never worry about losing them in a wildfire, tornado, or flood.įilm scanning is recovering from a market implosion several years ago, when Canon, Minolta, and Nikon all either got out of the business or cut back their offerings. I also like the idea that if you’re a tablet or smartphone user, digital photos let you carry around happy moments from your life.
#CAN I SAVE PHOTOS FROM A PLUSTEK SCANNER SOFTWARE#
Digital versions of your photos can be easily tweaked and fine-tuned with editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s Aperture. There are reasons other than sentimental ones to scan your photos. So I was delighted a few months ago when Plustek Technology, a maker of scanners and other optical gear, asked if I wanted to review its latest film scanner, the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i Ai. But the good scanners had prices in four figures, and amid a parade of steadily improving and lower-cost models it was always hard to tell if the time had come to take the plunge and buy one. Periodically, I would resolve to get a slide-and-film scanner and convert the slides to digital images that I could store on my computer. Then, after a midlife divorce and a move to a smallish apartment, I stacked the binders on shelves in my parents’ basement, 75 miles away from my apartment. At some point I inserted the slides in plastic pages and ordered them quasi-chronologically in big black three-ring binders.
The upshot is that the most indelible link to some of the happiest times of my life consists of a few thousand 35-mm images, mostly color slides.
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Original image on Kodak Color IR, scanned using the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i Ai. Portrait of the Author: Glenn Zorpette with his trusty Minolta SRT-201 circa 1978. I broke the camera I had it fixed I broke it again, I had it fixed again. Army missile-test facilities for the Los Angeles Times. Navy research divers for Scientific American. In Panama City, Fla., I took pictures of U.S. In Mumbai and Delhi and Chennai, I shot street scenes and research centers for IEEE Spectrum. It was a basic 35-mm single-lens reflex, and as a college student and later as a journalist, I toted it around the world-literally. I got my first real camera, a Minolta SRT-201, as a high school student in 1977.