Pros: Dedicated high resolution 35mm film scanner: can produce files greater than 30 megabytes.
Cons: Requires that each negative be carefully framed in it's special film strip holder.
The Bottom Line: Older generation, quality film scanner produces excellent high resolution digital image files. Used it may be inexpensive enough to get much use by students without a lot of cash.
zlotmachinskyr's Full Review: Konica Minolta QuickScan 35 Plus Film Scanner (35 ...
If you shoot 35 mm film today or have in the past then you can produce high resolution digital photo files from your slides or negatives with the Minolta Quickscan 35 Plus. This is a SCSI-2 type scanner capable of producing *.BMP photo files of up to 2800 DPI resolution. My unit did not come with a SCSI-2 card so I purchased a SIIG brand SCSI-2 card and it works just fine with this Minolta Quickscan plus. Note that now the maximum resolution available for todays top 35 mm film scanners are advertised as 4000 DPI capable and are quite costly in comparison to the 2800 DPI scanners. It is always nice to have the highest resolution available for the best results but presently and for some time to come, 4000 DPI will be out of reach for many consumers and potential users. The cost factor is always the limiting factor for any activity be it a hobby or bussiness related.
An Older Generation Unit.
This is an older generation film scanner and it produces sharp high resolution film scans of dust free, scratch free negatives and slides. As long as your negatives and slides are in excellent physical shape and properly exposed, this Minolta Quickscan will yield very nice digital image files. This film scanner has no corrective software for damaged slides or negatives such as Digital ICE and Digital ROC which is now supplied with several current generation film scanners including some of the more expensive current generation Minolta film scanners. Digital ICE (D. ICE)and Digital ROC (D. ROC) software are a products of Applied Science Fiction. D. ICE helps cover up physical blemishes on slides and negatives such as scratches or fingerprints and eliminate them from photo images printed from the resulting digital image files. D. ROC does automatic color correction and enhancements needed for digital photographic files in need of color restoration and improvements.
Very basic software provided, VERY basic.
The unit comes with one 3.5 inch floppy disk for installing drivers for this scanner and some basic software for actually scanning slides and negatives. The unit is compact and feels very solidly made. The scanner will initialize once you have turned on the scanner and reboot your computer. Underneath on the bottom near the back is an additional on off switch which is turned on and left on after installation.
Only one image at a time, Oh My!
Slides feed directly into the unit one at a time and the user can rotate the image, try different scan resolutions, check and adjust focus at critical areas and quickly do a final scan. Negatives are a little more difficult to scan in that each negative must be manually moved into position inside a hinged plastic negative holder. The negative holder will handle a film strip of up to 6 images. The first three negatives of the inserted film strip can be scanned one at a time and the last three negatives must be rotated 180 degrees and then again scanned one at a time, in the same manner as the first three. This is a little inconvenient but NOT if you are only scanning your best photo negatives or slides. This slower manual loading of single images on film really doesn't matter as much for the person who knows which slides or negatives they want to scan from a proof sheet or light-table with loupe.
One added advantage of this particular film holder is that the negative will be scanned with the film held very flat. This should help maximize the sharpness picked up from a negative versus a slide that is not glass mounted for maximum flatness. Film strip holders that present more than one negative for other film scanners run a risk of greater film curl and loss of sharpness if the filmstrip holder is not well engineered.
The filmstrip holder is easy to insert in to the film scanner and if one clicks on the eject software button the negative holder will slowly withdraw to starting position to assist final manual withdrawal of the negative holder. Prints made from these digital imaging files have been very sharp, natural looking, and with good contrast and color saturation. It is a fact that many newer film scanners have better contrast performance than this unit. However the contrast performance is very good such that a properly exposed slide or negative will yield very satisfying digital photographic files in very rapid order. A 30 Megabyte scan takes only 60 seconds and previews scan much more rapidly.
Mass Storage Please!
Full resolution files are in excess of 30 megabytes in size so storage to a mass storage device such as CD-R or CD-RW eventually becomes a necessity for storage of such large files. Such large high resolution digital image files easily produce 8 x 12 inch prints of photographic quality on premium inkjet photo paper. Larger images are possible with such large digital image files. I am not sure just how large but larger images could be made by many of the 13 x 19 inch inkjet photo quality printers available for the home user today or professional labs with the giant professional inkjet printers available today.
The higher contrast capability of many newer scanners can help produce details in the shadows and hightlights that might get lost with scanners with a little lower contrast rating such as with this Minolta Quickscan 35 plus. This seems to be more in theory than in actual practice and perhaps is mostly helpful for marginal slides and negatives that need tweaking related to being the only available image. Thus these marginal slides or negatives must then be dealt with since one has no other possibility. If you need to scan a lot of slides or negatives in bulk or work with damaged, poorly exposed, or improper color balanced exposures then you will need a different film scanner to meet your requirements. D-max is listed as 3.0 for this scanner.
Don't pay much more that about $200 for a new unit if available. The next way to obtain a Minolta Quickscan 35 Plus is on the used market. Perhaps you can pick one up used for a song on e-bay. I found my Minolta Quickscan new in Los Angeles at a major Pro photo shop.
Archive like a beehive, yeah!
A good unit for scanning a person's best slides and negatives from the past so as to archive and successfully create digital image files of one's finest photos. Using Adobe photo manipulation software on the resulting digital image files worked without a hitch. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements Ver. 1.0 (at approx $98) and their very inexpensive basic version, Photo Deluxe Ver. 4.0 (at about $40). Note: A newer version of Photoshop Elements (i.e. Version 2.0) has just recently been released.
So There You Are and There You Is!
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