Scanners > Film scanner (35 mm) Scanners > SCSI (Parallel) > 36-bit colour

Advantages: Aps, ease of use
Disadvantages: Now out of date

This scanner was, in its day, a must have for any serious amateur photographer who was aching to digitise their negs and slides. And in those days it was superb at its job. You load a strip of negs into the holder and slide the clip over the frame you want, slot it in the scanner and off it goes. Mounted slides are even simpler, just load them straight in. The software it comes with, again, did the job. It provided all the necessary controls and ...
...with most scanning software there is also a set of "not really needed options" such as colour adjustment. These processes are best carried out in your image manipulation program where there are usualy better guides for the changes you are making. A major disadvantage now is the lack of any dust/scratch reduction option when you scan, meaning any damaged films wil need intense manual retouching. The scanner itself is actualy quite large and takes ... Read review

Advantages: 4000dpi,speed,ease of use,price,versitile, dust off feature
Disadvantages: negative film carrier hard to insert sometimes, colour control, software

...some consideration I bought a Polaroid SprintScan 4000. After producing a few hundred scans with this equipment I have come to know the scanner's strengths (many) and weaknesses (few). The Sprintscan 4000 offers a lot of features for the retail price (around £890.00 incl VAT): 4000dpi optical resolution, high dynamic range (which means it can cope with over-exposed/developed film much better), cold cathode light source (like the ones used on the ...
...(which is not). However, the Polaroid software is reasonably good and allows a good degree of correction and control of the final scan. Colour correction is not so easy and I have had to adjust the colour balances of scans quite regularly in an image editing program afterwards. The colour manipulation interface could be better, but it still produces very high quality images after some tweaking. One other criticism is that its not possible to scan ... Read review

Advantages: Value for money, excellent quality
Disadvantages: Will take up all of your time !

...and swapped it for the Acer 2720s and haven't had a problem since. As an aside, Jessops were extremely co-operative about the whole process. Specification ************* The 2720s is a 2700 bits-per-inch scanner which can take slides or 35mm negatives which it loads from cartridges. Three cartridges are supplied, one for negatives, and one for each of thin and thick mounted slides. It will scan up to 36bit colour, but I have only used it at 24bit ...
...Windows 2000 and according to Acer needs a minimum of 32Mb of memory. That last part is wrong, the scanner driver may work with that but you will not be able to edit your pictures easily. I use paintshop pro, and I upgraded my PC to 64Mb. That is barely adequate. The scanner comes with Ulead Photo Express and Photoshop LE. I prefer paintshop, but Ulead products have always been good in my experience. My *experience* of the product ****************************** ... Read review

Advantages: Simple to use, Relatively Cheap, Looks good.
Disadvantages: Takes a while to install.

Being a Graphic Art student, during my first year of university I found myself fighting the urge to buy a scanner. However, even mounting student debts and an overdraft extension could not put me off this bargain of a scanner. Other scanners on the market either seem to have too many needless features bumping the prices up, or they are painfully slow and bulky machines that would not sit comfortably next to a new Mac. I managed to get mine for around ...
...perfect for fast but accurate scans of images, without the fuss of useless applications that clog up your memory [it works best straight through Photoshop]. The added extras like automatic white balancing saves time, and cropping whilst in preview mode. To add to the list of necessities, it is quite light, it easy to clean, and looks sleek in silver and black. It may take a while to install but it's not complicated and is worth the wait when you ... Read review

Advantages: Very easy to use
Disadvantages: A bit slow

I bought this item a few years ago and was very impressed, easy to set up and use. Just plug it in load the software and off you go. The TWAIN adapter is easy to use, just click on preview, and then on the photos you want to have scan, you get the choice of rotating them, and playing about with the colours if you want to, and a choice of what sizes you want them scanned with. Canon, are very good and have produced many updates to the TWAIN, the ...
...manily used this with the APS adapter wchich has been effortless, just load the film in teh cartridge, slide the cartridge into the machine, press the scan button and wait for the photos to appear. I have only used the film adapter once, and did not find that the film lined up with theframes on the adapter. It also comes with adapters for slides, which my family have made good use off, again easy to use, load the slides, push the adapter in and ... Read review