I was sadly surprised to see such poor results from perfectly exposed scanned slides. I’ve been involved in the photographic industry since 1975, developing slides and both colour and black and white negatives and also printing enlargements as well.
I finally got around to buying the Plustek 8300i AE and upgraded the SilverFast software for the autopilot workflow. And although I’m very happy with the speed and outcome when scanning negatives, I am saddened to see it fail so badly when scanning slides.
I understand the principles behind the challenges of slide scanning, but I really thought we had progressed to getting better results with a £400 slide scanner in the 21st century.
In my search for a better slide scanning solution, I came across NLP and I will definitely give it a go. I saw some YouTube channels using it very effectively for white balance groups of negatives and more. I know it’ll be useful.
But I now see it’s long overdue for someone to develop a more effective way of scanning slides that will produce the rich colours and depth of fields. I’m sure it’ll be technically challenging but when someone can invent the near-perfect slide scan result, without going the way of drum scanning or Flextight X5, I’m all in!
Until then, I will be renting time with an X5 to scan my slides as this Plustek 8300i just doesn’t do it for me for slide scanning. Not even close.
Welcome to the forum @frankbiganski, I wonder if you could expand on what you’ve discovered about your Plustek 8300i scans and compare them with the X5 results? There’s a huge difference in the initial cost of the two machines of course so one would have to expect the X5 to be far better but it sounds as if the Plustek/Silverfast combination has failed to deliver?
Thank you for having me. I will definitely post my experience with the X5. And yes, based on the cost differences between the two machines, I am truly hoping the X5 delivers better slide-scanning results.
I was able to adjust the settings within SilverFast and obtain a slightly better slide scan, and I’ll post an iPhone pic of the slide next to the scan so you can see a side-by-side comparison.
I know my right-brained self has become overly accustomed to the basic digital quality we get using today’s digital cameras and phones. Even when I paid to have my “high-resolution” SVHS video tapes digitised from the 1990’s, I gasped at what 450 lines of horizontal resolution produced. Might be better to downscale the view, if at all possible. Hard to believe that was considered some of the best quality around! I know we are spoiled today and I try to keep my digital bias in check.
But I hope to be getting to the X5 late next week or the last week this month. I’m scanning 240 120mm negatives from my wedding and the studio estimates it’ll take me at least 8 hours to complete - maybe slightly longer. But I’m also going to fit in about a dozen slides as well.
I’m still looking forward to using NLP for batch development too! Not enough hours in the day!
Thanks, I can’t tell whether you already have experience with the X5. I have an elderly Imacon Flextight Precision II so I don’t have experience myself but they work in the same fashion. The X5 is much, much faster and I think has extra dynamic range. I think that they both share the same 75mm Rodenstock Magnagon lens (fixed aperture but thought to be very similar to the Apo-Rodagon 2x). They can both scan to the ‘FFF’ proprietary RAW format so this means that you can take these home with you and process at home, the Flexcolor software is free to download, I’d recommend that you do that since you don’t want to have to learn how to use Flexcolor as part of your paid time.
Using 3F means that the only reason to rescan is perhaps if they weren’t as clean as you like but also if the focus wasn’t spot on and you can check this with something called the Detail Window and changing the Descreen setting by a unit either side.
Nate has advice on dealing with 3F scans in NLP here:
Note that he doesn’t work with the 3F scans, he renames the ‘fff’ suffix to ‘tif’, but whatever you do 3F gives you the best of both worlds.
An incredible amount of information and thanks a million to both you Harry and Nate for sharing the information. Scanning negatives and slides today is completely brand new for me and your insight will help me tremendously in post and that I’m sure of.
I was able to obtain a better scan using VueScan and I found the software had adjustments that were more easily accessible, more user friendly. I was able to get a closer-matching scan eventually using SilverFast, but neither software produced what I was hoping for. But again, I know 21st century digital has spoiled my visual senses.
Thanks also for the tip on downloading Flexcolor as that will help me before sitting down with that machine for the first time ever. After reading the article on Know How Transfer, I am getting really excited about what that machine will produce using the 3F scans too!
This has really be an enjoyable learning experience as I embark on this new endeavours. And so glad I came across your software and forum before I booked time with the X5!
Gerry Yaeger, a one-time Imacon insider, has very good stuff on his site, including Flexcolor downloads. Depending upon what you have you may need an older operating system to run Flexcolor though. Good tutorials:
