skhong's Full Review: Pacific Digital Prime Film 1800 u Film Scanner (35...
I was helping my mother evaluate scanners. She needed to do a large quantity of slides. I suggested an inexpensive flatbed scanner (Epson 1660 photo) but she liked the size of this one, the Pacific Image PrimeFilm 1800U scanner.
So we brought it home and hooked it up.
No Driver. She runs WinXP on a laptop, and the cd that came with the scanner did not contain something that would work with XP. Fortunately the website (www.scanace.com) had a newer driver that supported XP. 30 minutes later (she still uses dialup) the scanner was up and running.
I pop in a negative and leave all the settings alone. It scanned at 1800dpi and saved it as a jpg high quality. Looks terrible. The picture has a blue cast to the entire thing, washed out colors, little contrast, and it is slightly fuzzy to boot!
OK. So 15 minutes later, I'm able to Photoshop the image to look something like the scan I made from a print on my flatbed scanner (epson 1240) on automatic. Still not quite as nice as the flatbed. There is too much noise, and the default curves need to be adjusted.
Let's try "full automatic" on this film scanner. I turned on Auto Exposure, and Auto Gamma and scanned again. Now, the picture turns out almost entirely blue with no hint of any other colors. Turn off AE and AG, and we're back to the same as above, pretty normal, but lacking life, color, sharpness, and more.
AFTER reading these other reviews on this same scanner, IT's GOING BACK. Back to the store.
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