Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II Film Scanner (35 mm)

Pros: Overall good image quality and relatively fast in OS 9.
Cons: Poor software support and customer support. No Mac OSX support to date.

Although the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II is advertised as being "Mac compatible," that label is misleading. It's last year's Mac-compatible, or more to the point, last century's.

When I was looking at digital film scanners in the sub-$1000...

Pros: Firewire, USB connections. Batch scanning of mounted slides. Easy software interface.
Cons: Poor quality.

I bought a Scan Elite II on the strength of magazine write-ups. My own experience has been far less ...

I bought it to scan 2000 slides from the years 1955 - 1980, many were faded and had mold spots. The digital ICE program included as well as the color correction, film grain removal and autocropping programs proved to be very usefull. You can only batch 4 slides or 6 picture neg strip at a time. In reality it takes 20 minute to scan 4 slides with the 3 processing filters applied. It is the only slide scanner I have used, so this may actually be better than some other scanners. I was saving the files as jpgs and was frustrated to find the program defaulted back to tif. I had to select jpg again after each set of 4 slides, and assign a new name since the program does not auto number after 4 slides. I just wanted to get the slides into the computer as fast as possible, and later re-scan if there was a special picture. You can get beautiful output from each slide, if you are willing to put in the time to prescan and adjust.