I wanted to convert my slide and negative collection to electronic images that I could save on a cdrom. I wanted to do this for two reasons, one, because my collection takes up a lot more room than a couple of cdroms and two, because print negatives and slide film tend to color shift over time.

Installation:
Being a USB device, installation was very easy. Software and drivers are loaded first. After rebooting you simply plug the power supply into the wall and plug in the usb cable to your system then turn on the scanner and it should be instantly recognized and ready to use. There are several software updates on prime film's web page so be sure you've got the latest drivers for everything. Somethings are picky about the usb ports they use, this one works fine on my powered hub.

Software:
This scanner comes with a decent suite of software. Presto Pagemanager is probably the package that you'll use the very most. If you've got more than one scanner in your system as I do, you'll have to select the source from which you want to acquire before you'll be able to scan with the Primefilm. I've found that the hotbutton doesn't seem to function, at least on my system but this is really only a minor inconvenience.

As pagemanager is used the most, I'll cover it most extensively. As with most scanners, there is a popup utility that actually controls the scanner. The control utility pops up whenever the acquire option is selected and it's also supposed to pop up when you hit the button on the front of the scanner (which doesn't currently work on my system).

When you acquire an image with the control utility, a rather well laid out set of controls pops up along with a space for a near actual sized thumbnail of your scan when you hit the preview button.

There are several buttons across the top left of the screen that allow you to change scan resolution, play with the color settings, and select negative or positive image to scan. The software also allows you to select between RGB mode settings and a mode that is more like a photo lab color corrector would use (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, etc.) In the color section, this software has two very useful buttons that allow you to pick a white or black section of the image and the software will automatically!!! set the proper color curve! These two buttons alone are fantastically useful, I had several old red shifted slides that it was able to clean up wonderfully just by clicking one button.

Be aware that the higher the quality setting, scan dpi and scan bits are set, the more system memory your scan will require. I have over 300 meg of ram in my system and I've found that this software doesn't or can't use virtual memory for scans. If you don't have a large amount of system memory you will be limited in your scan resolutions. Since by and large I only make 5X7 prints I chose a scan resolution and quality setting that creates approximately 25 meg files which should be plenty for what I would ever want to use them for.

After you've got your previewed image color corrected the way you want it (you also have zoom capability and the ability to rotate the image) you hit the scan button to create the actual image. The scan pops up in pagemanager behind the scanner control utility. I really find it annoying that you must exit the control utility in order to manipulate the image you just created in pagemanager. In a perfect world you'd be able to leave both running--hopefully they'll fix this in a future update. Right clicking allows you to save your scan in a variety of formats.

The Pagemanager software saves a thumbnail of every image you scan on your desktop until you specifically delete it. When you want to scan another slide there is a scanner icon on the toolbar across the top of your screen or you can select acquire from the file menu.

Now your familiar control utility is back. The control utility for the most part saves all your settings from the last scan, except for some reason it doesn't keep your bit settings. i.e. it defaults to 24 bit scans with an option for 36 bit scans, This needs to be updated as there doesn't seem to be a way to set it to default to 36 bit scan mode and it's annoying to have to reset it for every slide or negative. Other than this annoyance all your color and quality and scan dpi settings are saved until you hit the reset button. The color settings screen has it's own default button so you can change that without resetting everything.

I've scanned quite a number of color slides and color corrected quite a number of those. I think the unit gives good performance and other than the above noted software annoyances, it's very easy to use and gives very nice results.

Update: 8-2001: You may notice that the above review was written when scanning slides primarily. Since I wrote this at least one person has written to me to say that negative scans seem to be extremely light. I must admit that I haven't tried scanning too many negatives with this device, but the ones I did scan did have to be darkened to get a good scan. From my photography days I know that this is one reason why many professionals prefer slide to print film. The negative film will have different color balancing from brand to brand (slide film displays this too but not to the extent that print film does if you ask me)and will probably require you to reprogram your color curve every time you change brands of film. Most of us just grab whatever's on sale when we buy film so I can see that scanning a lot of negatives with this gadget could get annoying quickly. I've managed to lose the majority of my negatives in the house someplace so until I find them I can't really give a good opinion of how this unit performs with negative film. I still think it's a good buy for what it is.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 200.00
Interface: USB