Hello,
i am looking into buying a dedicated 35mm film scanner at the moment, because I am shooting mostly 35mm and am not satisfied with the results I get from my V550. I will settle for a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i but am unsure which version to get.
If I understand it correctly the Ai version comes with a calibration slide, which is not interesting to me since I only shoot negative film, and the ability to export images with 48 Bit color per channel, which would be important for NLP.
What are your thoughts on this and did I get the differences of the versions correctly?
Hey,
Plustek 8200i user here.
The AI and SE stands for included Silverfast software license to adjust and make your scans.
You are right that AI version includes calibration slides and Silverfast AI version includes Auto-calibration that utilizes these slides.
The biggest difference will be if you convert negatives within Silverfast - SE version allows you to export converted images in 24 bits for color and 8 bits for black and white. The AI allows for 48 and 16 respectively.
However if you do not convert within SIlverfast and export raw data, SE will also export 48 and 16 bit negatives. Then you use Negative Lab Pro to do the conversion instead.
Personally I went with Plustek SE, just because it is cheaper to buy SE and Negative Lab Pro than the AI version alone.
Hello!
So, if I want to buy a dedicated film scanner for the reason that I want to save some money by scanning film myself, but I still have to pay monthly for Lightroom Classic, which costs about 8-10 bucks, that’s almost the same amount of money I’d save scanning at home so I won’t save any money in the end right?
Steady on, there’s a bit of confusion about ‘bits’ here. It’s not 48 bit colours per channel, it’s either 8-bits per channel or 16-bits per channel, so for 3 channels (R,G &B) that’s either 24-bit (3x8) or 48-bit (3x16) output. They also have a 64-bit RGBi format which adds the infra red channel for dust cleaning, so 4x16 = 64. I imagine it scans in 16-bit, you need that for processing colour really though nothing wrong with outputting as 8-bit if you’re finished with processing.
Interesting to see that the hype over on the Plustek website is tacitly acknowledging that the main competition is now coming from those using their camera so they talk of 69 megapixel resolution and RAW files etc. In fact the measured optical resolution is only 3250 ppi according to filmscanner.info.
If the optical resolution was actually 7200 ppi then in terms of megapixels for a 36mm x 24mm frame that would indeed equate to 69MP (10204 x 6908 = 69,422,470 pixels). However if the lower 3250 ppi figure is correct then that equates to a much more modest 14MP (4606 x 3070 = 14,140,240 pixels).
However I quite understand that a dedicated film scanner with its own dedicated software does make life a lot easier, assembling a camera scanning setup from scratch is quite involved and quite expensive, particularly if you don’t have a suitable camera. I liked this (tongue in cheek?) article by Rory Prior, “DSLR scanning sucks” that puts the case for a Plustek 8200i over a Fuji X-T2 (which I happen to use).