Plustek OpticFilm 8300i SE - 35mm Negative Film Stripe & Slide Scanner with 38% scan speed increase, Bundle SilverFast SE Plus 9 + QuickScan Plus, Support Mac and Windows.

I have now scanned nearly 3000 slides with this and I am pleased I went for this one. The software with it was a bit daunting at first but I soon got the swing of how to process the thousands of slides I have. I have it down to a fine art now, place four slides into the holder, dust them off. Place the holder into the scanner and click the prescan icon. Two quick shortcut keys to reset the frame and auto settings. If the image needs fine tuning, there are numerous quick ways to do that. Then scan, usually about 10 seconds to scan and save. The auto numbering would be useful if you could define the names it used. I prefer to rotate to portrait in the file viewer separate to the software as it takes quite a few seconds to process, I have lost a few scans because of forgetting to wait. I now look through all the images in Windows viewer and rotate using that. These are minor niggles though. As I said, I am really pleased with this scanner, it has worked hard and well for a few weeks now

For many years I used to bring slides and negatives to our local photo studio for digitizing which was very expensive. This Plustek 8300i SE can produce much higher quality photos at far less cost than the photo studio. Additionally, I can easily see slides that I don't want to save whereas I would send some of these slides to the photo studio, increasing the cost. The quality, speed and ease of use of this machine is well worth the cost as it scans relatively quickly, depending on the quality that you want to acheive.

Mostly reliable & works almost every time, like all things though, an error happens & it doesn’t scan the whole slide, my work around is to switch modes & rescan the slide, not sure if I can blame the scanner or my laptop for this.The scanning isn’t a fast process, but it can recover something from all the slide’s & negatives I’ve put through so far, the editing software allows me to enlarge the subject too

Scan quality is very good and scan times are fast. Software that comes with the scanner allows good range of tweaks. Really happy with quality of scans and detail captured from the negatives. At max resolution scans are approx 250mb and capture good dynamic range.

Loved the ease of use but as everyone says, use VueScan from Hamrick not the bundled package. Scans a lot faster than expected thank goodness (15 minutes I read somewhere? What were people trying to do?!)

It does everything it says on the tin, but the supplied software is a little tricky to use unless you buy the fully licenced version of Silverfast. Using the supplied software, Quickscan plus, you have a problem that once you have set the image to your preferences, you cannot go back and change what you did once you exit the setting window. The image while capable of being up to a very high resolution, the resulting image is not as sharp as the original 35mm slides, which is a bit disappointing after spending so much on this scanner. Although capable of 7200 DPI the optics are not significantly better than cheaper scanners. It seems to be sturdily built so should be capable of a high throughput if you have a lot of slides, but it is not fast.

I decided to go for the 8300i rather than the cheaper models to get an improvement inthe software and speed of scanning. The software is a bit clunky but once you get used to it, it does a great job. The scanning quality is certainly a massive step-up from my previous small negative scanner. I'm very happy with my purchase and would do the same again.

Unable to get it to work at all, Poor instructions and in the end gave up and returned it for a refund.