Great scan quality, value for money, but rather slow

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fantastic scan quality Price is right Software has a lot of useful features

Cons: Sloooow

The Bottom Line: 
Great scanner if you are doing low volume work. The price is great, and the quality of the scans leaves nothing to be desired.

Author's Review
The bottom line for this scanner is that the scan quality is incredible, but if scan speed is a primary concern for you, you might as well stop reading now and look at some more expensive and faster scanners.

I won't bother describing the hardware, others have already done that. Suffice to say that it doesn't need a lot of room on the desktop, which is nice.

Focus on the initial prescan is inconsistent - sometimes it's right on, sometimes it's off. You can re-focus either manually or by letting the autofocus do it again. When it refocuses automatically, it's as good as doing it manually. But either way, it's mandatory to refocus so you don't do the final scan only to find that it's not sharp.

The digital ICE (for removing dust/dirt) is really wild. It cleans up old or dusty slides with no visible difference in subject sharpness. I did high-resolution scans of a very old slide twice, once with ICE and once without, then compared them side by side in Photoshop. I could not see any difference in sharpness, and I've been shooting with high-end lenses for over 25 years.

The software interface will be easy to use for anyone who is familiar with Photoshop. As far as functionality goes it's pretty good. However, it is one of the worst designed user interfaces I have seen since we stopped entering commands on the DOS line. It just looks cheap and poorly thought-out. If you put the cursor on a button and wait for the little box explaining the function of that button, you'll be waiting a long time because it won't happen. I finally realized that the explanation appears in a small box at the top right of the window. So you put the cursor on the button, then shift your view all the way up to the corner. It's just stupid, and for a major corporation selling an expensive piece of equipment it's an embarrassment. But all the functionality is there if you want it. The 'Pixel Polish' button actually does a decent job of correcting contrast/exposure problems automatically. As I mentioned, the ICE is great. Anything else I usually do in Photoshop anyway.

Scan speed - forget the advertised scan times. Chances are you'll want to use ICE (which is a major time saver for images that need this kind of help), or make some other adjustments. As soon as you do that, scan time goes up rather dramatically.

Considering the need to refocus the prescan, and the high scan times in general, I wouldn't recommend this scanner for high-volume work. You'll tear your hair out. But for price-value ratio and overall scan quality, this is one great product.