OpticFilm 8300i Ai Film Scanner - Ai Studio 9 + Advanced IT8 Target

There seems to be a large gap between the cheap film digitizers and the commercial grade film scanners. This is one of the few options out there that gives fantastic results for under $1,000. I'm well within the "amateur photographer" range, so this is really a bit overkill for my needs. Not complaining at all, I am very happy with what it can do. The scratch-fix works well, but it isn't a miracle worker. There is only so much it can do to save the image. If the scratch is severe, it will come through and there's no fixing that. The speed of the machine is great at about 30 seconds per image at 3600dpi. When cranked all the way up to 7200dpi, the scan takes about 3 min. Image qquality is fantastic. You can see the film grain quite clearly when zoomed in, even on the lower 3600dpi setting. The biggest drawback is SilverFast9. It's a hassle to get up and running, and has quite a learning curve. I've never used darkroom or photoshop, so the features on here are well beyond my pay grade. But with perseverance, you can get a preset that you like and keep it there. Alternatively, you can use Plustek's proprietary scan software Quickscan Plus. This offers hassle-free scanning for those less computer savvy. I love the detents for feeding the film through the scanner, and the flaps that keep the dust out when the feeder is out of the machine. Though I keep it zipped up in the protective case when not in use, just to keep it dust-free. Overall, it's a great device for amateurs trying to digitize 35mm photos and professionals who can get the most out of the complicated software. I know, it's a bitter pill to spend $600 on a scanner that only does one format. But the one format it does, it does very well.

Not a professional photographer, just have hundreds of rolls from 30 years of keeping a camera on me at all times. This has been a godsend to see all these photos again. Many prints have been given away, framed, lost, destroyed, etc, but I always kept the negatives. This is not a fast machine, in that obviously you have to do every shot one at a time, but the picture quality is great. I opted to just scan everything in at 3600dpi jpg, using the quick scan program for a full catalog of pics. Then, for the ones I plan to do something with, I use the Silverfast 9 program to do a full scan with adjustment. And there are A LOT of possible adjustments. Admittedly, at a level I’m not even fully knowledgeable about. But the tutorials, and guided scanning/editing make it seem super easy. I have so many negatives that I’ll be doing this quite a while into the future, but I don’t mind. I do a few rolls while watching a show, work on other projects, come back to it. Something I did was to buy archival pages for the negatives. Then numbered them using whatever cataloging/ numbering system I felt like. Naming the scans using that name/# that I wrote on each page (which is then in a 3ring binder) was extremely easy to do in the scanning programs, and it means I can go back to find an individual shot later. Not really a pro-tip, just a suggestion. Machine is small, doesn’t take up much space and comes with a storage case/bag which fits the cords and plates easily. It’s a lot of money to spend if you only have a few rolls to do, but if you have as many as I do, it’s a great investment for the memories alone. I imagine if you were to have a small business to do this for others, this would be THE scanner to buy. Simple set up. Easy to use. Highly recommend.

My first scanner failed to work. No light when scanning. I had to buy a replacement. The software manufacturer has nothing to do with hardware issues. I’ll have to send it out for repairs.

This worked extremely well for high resolution scans of slides and negatives. I found it to be quite fast. It doesn't "auto feed" so you will have to push the slide carrier to advance to the next frame. But it was easy to do and never presented a problem. I scanned 500 slides at 1200 dpi in a day or two.

I don't normally like to write reviews, but I'm going to make an exception for this Plustek OptikFilm 8300i scanner. I started taking slide photos about 45 years ago when I was a bit younger and traveling the world working in the oil and gas exploration industry. It was nearly 15 years or so before digital cameras became common place and eventually those were replaced by smart phones with cameras that can zoom in to the moon through a cloud layer, or so it seems. In any event - whipping out the slide projector and finding a blank white wall at the cocktail party kinda went out of favor and I needed to find a way to digitize my analog life in pictures before smart phones, so I can compile some TikTocks or YouTubes and go viral before I croak. After a bit of online research I ponied up the dough to get this scanner because my attempt to fabricate a cheap rig with calipers, rubber bands, and bamboo chopsticks -quite frankly - did not work as well as I had hoped. For my needs and to my surprise, I have been able to easily convert over a thousand slides so far to my digital archive with very acceptable results, and had no problem installing and using the supplied software. I would recommend maybe perusing the help section or pdf manual as the software seems very in depth, but if you are like me you should be fine just winging it. I'm going to wait until I finish the last couple thousand or so slides I still have to process before choosing which files I wish to spend much time trying to improve upon. I did try to do some film negatives just to see how that worked - it is a bit of a pain to get the strips into the film holder but depending on the condition of the film strips the digital files are quite good and can be manipulated in the software very easily. Most of my print pictures after 40-50 years of sitting in shoe boxes in the top of a closet are a bit dull - but scanning the negatives with this scanner makes them look as good as new. One thing I will say - even though the documentation mentions (sales jargon) that there is a lot of AI embedded into this system - you still need to do a lot of manual processing and loading / unloading and naming and copying and adjusting - takes some time. Nothing automatic about this system, so you can't just sit a box of slides down next to the unit and tell Siri to make jpegs out of them while you go have a beer. No one click button to push for a finished product I'm afraid. Anyway - overall I am pleased with the purchase and the results so far have surpassed my expectations, I am sure there is a whole lot more I can learn to get better quality scans out of the software but for now I am very well satisfied with this unit. Hope it doesn't break anytime soon.

This is a great scanner. I can’t remember how much time the setup took, but it was less than an hour. I use a 2019 MacBook Pro and a PC. Connecting to my MacBook was a minor challenge. Using a USB converter didn’t work, but plugging it into my Anker USB hub worked perfectly. Using the hub also gave me a more convenient place to plug in my Time Machine disk. I’ve used a lot of scanners over the years, HP, Brother, Epson, Nikon, Kodak, and now a PlusTech film and slide scanner. The Kodak photo scanner mentioned is the one on Amazon that has a sheet feeder. It’s a piece of junk, so don’t waste your time. It jams all the time if you put more than two photos in the feeder. I replaced the Kodak with the PlusTech ePhoto scanner and it works great. It doesn’t have a sheet feeder, but you can scan over 100 pictures an hour at 300 dpi. I really like both PlusTek scanners so far, perhaps more than the Nikon scanner I had 25 years ago. I still haven’t compared images scanned on the PlusTek to those scanned on the Nikon, but I expect the PlusTek images to be better. I’m currently using an Epson Perfection V600 flatbed scanner as well. It works great and plays really well with the Epson software, VueScan, and SilverFast, which it comes with. It can be converted into a film and slide scanner using the included adapters. Adapters are available for many film sizes and type. There’s even an attachment for the old disk camera film! I used it to scan a bunch of 120 film and the scans look great. I haven’t gotten around to comparing the Epson 120 scans to scans from the Nikon medium format scanner. I haven’t gotten around concerns about getting the film laying flat with the film adapters. One thing I’d be remiss to not mention is scanner software in general. In my experience, just about every scanner program is “buggier” than other software and it’s something I’ve come to expect. The software sometimes freezes up when saving the image file at the end. This scanner doesn't bug out nearly as much as others. I’m also trying out the Pacific Image PowerFilm. That scanner is a lot buggier and frequently freezes after batch scanning a strip of film. The multi strip feeder works great with one strip of film, but it too has difficulties scanning multiple strips. It’ll get returned if this isn’t remedied.

Apple's latest devices use what's called ARM chips -- the M1 or M2 -- and Plustek doesn't provide a driver for those. A tech support person has told me it has no plans to create one, either. While Plustek claims the 8300i is "compatible with" these chips, what that really means is that you have to use Apple's workaround, called Rosetta, that emulates the older Intel chips it used to use. Anyone familiar with Apple software knows it's reasonable to wonder how long the company will continue to support that. I didn't realize this until I tried to install the Silverfast scanning software Plustek bundles. By default, on an M1 Mac, it will try to install the native ARM version, so it threw up an error message saying I had to switch instead. Silverfast is not very user-friendly, so I would prefer to use VueScan, which is very good about supporting all sorts of scanners, even ones long out of production. But it crashes as soon as it sees the 8300i connected, and the VueScan creator -- who's very good about support -- can't figure out what's going wrong. If I'd known all this first, I would probably have bought a different scanner. If you have a newer Mac, I'd recommend you do the same. Other notes: Scanning of slides is fine. Roll film is more problematic. The film holder doesn't have any sprockets to hold the film in place; adjusting film to stay in the proper spot is fidgety. You have to line up the individual frames with the plastic separators in the holder, and that's not easy. Some of the old clips I want to scan are extremely curled; that not only makes it even harder to put them in correctly, but the film holder isn't tight enough to flatten them.

I was very hesitant about this item being able to perform, but it has definitely exceeded my expectations. The SilverFast software can take a minute to learn (which I am still doing), but the results are quite good. I've been able to scan both film negatives and slides and it does better than I expected for both. A few downsides (which others have mentioned) is that it is fairly slow if you are doing 3600 dpi or above. It can take a while to get through even one roll of film, at about 2 - 3 minutes per image and that's without doing extensive editing. One other thing is that it's a manual process to advance the tray from one image to another. It's not hard to push the tray in, but it would be nice if there was an auto advance feature. At this price point, I do understand the limitation. And to be honest, it's one less thing to break in the future. Overall, I've been very pleased with the results and even though it would be nice if it was a little faster, this was not something that was unexpected when I made the purchase.

Het was even wat uitzoeken, maar ik kan al snel tot de conclusie dat dit één van de betere (misschien wel beste) negatieven scanner is voor "thuis" gebruik. De relatief grote investering hield mij nog een beetje tegen en het feit dat er in Amerika en Japan inmiddels ook een 9000i AI beschikaar is. De bijgeleverde software, Silverfast 9, en de resultaten van de scans hebben mij toch doen besluiten deze scanner te kopen. Ik heb hem nu een kleine 2 weken in gebruik en ongeveer 10 filmrolletjes gestand. In het begin was het even zoeken naar de beste scan resultaten voor mij, maar Silverfast heeft zoveel opties dat dit wel goed komt. De standaard scan software is ook al heel goed maar het corrigerende vermogen van Silverfast is fantastisch. Scannen en verwerken van één negatief duurt ongeveer 1,5 min. Wat ik had verwacht, ten onrechte, was dat de negatieven automatisch door zou schuiven naar de volgende maar dat is niet zo. Na elk negatief duw je de corrigerende zelf ééntje verder, heel eenvoudig. Ik ben enorm tevreden met de scanner, de software en vooral de resultaten. Ik heb nog zeker 100 filmrolletjes te gaan, maar kijk er nu al naar uit er weer mee verder te gaan.

International delivery quick and smooth. Device is new and received in good condition. Scanner works well and meets expectations.

Très bonne qualité de scan des dispo avec le logiciel Silverfast. La correction des poussières et taches fonctionne bien. Le mode workflow est paramétrable, se qui permet de privilégier les corrections nécessaires à un groupe de dispo (sombre , dominante de couleur...) le mode expert est complexe au début, mais grâce aux tuto en anglais... on s'en sort sans problème. Bref bon scan, même si scanner une par une les diapos est un process un peu long. Mais le résultat vaut le coup. Bon investissement.

Numérisation rapide ! Rendu des couleurs exceptionnel, surtout avec les mires de calibration incluses. Logiciel complet avec plusieurs réglages possibles.

It is unnecessary to order film and slide holders separately. They come as part of the overall bundle. AND the power pin supplied is incompatible with the Australian standard and it is necessary to purchase an adaptor. Yet to set up the unit. Have just purchased the adaptor.