Product Reviews

Not all flatbed scanners have the necessary backlight for capturing transparencies, but those that do start at around £60. These do a decent job if you're just archiving old holiday snaps, but if you're more serious about film photography you need something a little more specialised.

Plustek's OpticFilm 7200i is a dedicated film scanner that captures 35mm film strips and mounted slides. Its specifications sound promising enough: it can scan and output images in 48-bit colour, and its optical resolution of 7,200 dots per inch (dpi) is higher than that of many professional film scanners.

At this resolution, a 35mm

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negative yields a 70-megapixel image, so any hairs or dust on the original film will look massive on the capture. The OpticFilm comes with SilverFast iSRD software, which uses a combination of infrared scanning and software processing to detect and remove defects.

Film loaders are supplied for negative strips and mounted slides, although neither is marked with the correct film orientation, which seems an oversight. Once loaded, each holder slots manually into the scanner. At 16 seconds, previews were reasonably quick. Scans were also fast: a single negative took 48 seconds to capture at 2,400dpi and less than two minutes at 7,200dpi.

Scan quality wasn't as impressive as we'd hoped. High-resolution captures weren't very sharp. We detected blocky artefacts on 7,200dpi images. Detail was lost from the darkest and lightest regions of test images. Scans took twice as long when we used iSRD dust removal, though dust was reduced well with little loss of scan quality. For the best results, you'd need a can of compressed air.

Despite its impressive specifications, the OpticFilm doesn't deliver great images. We recommend you spend more on Epson's F-3200 film scanner, or less on a quality flatbed.