The PrimeFilm PF3600u film scanner
I bought the PF3600u scanner from Costco for about $120 back in late February. I liked the small footprint and I hoped I could use it to scan my ever-growing backlog of negatives. I also liked the price. After spending about 8 hours total (2 full evenings) playing with the options and scanning in three rolls of film (2×100 ISO, 1×800 ISO), I discovered the advertising wasn’t quite that truthful. Here’s what I found.
I scanned my shots at the maximum possible quality offered by the scanner interface: 16-bit, 600-dpi, TIF-format images. The total time to preview and scan a single negative was about 8 minutes, which is high, but allowable if the image quality is there (but it’s not). The images I got were NOT 18-megapixels, and at no point was I able to get 5238×3444 resolution. What’s worse, the scanner would cut off a portion from the top part of my images, as if the scanning mechanism couldn’t process the image in its entirety even though the film was loaded correctly.
On top of all this, at 100%, my images looked weird, as if the scanner introduced some cheap interpolation to get higher resolution. There was noticeable digital noise in each shot (just to remind you, this is 35mm film), and instead of getting clear details, things were a blur. (No, the in-camera focus had nothing to do with this.) The file size of each image hovered around 95MB, which I think is too much given the poor quality of the scans. If they had been incredible, I could live with that file size, but the best adjective I can use to describe them is mediocre. The last straw is that the scanner offered no dust & scratch removal whatsoever, leaving me to spend inordinate amounts of time in Photoshop editing each image — and that’s a big no-no for me. I haven’t got that kind of time on my hands.
Final verdict: this thing’s going back. Not worth my time and money.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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The seller was going to send it by priority mail but I requested...
I also spent about 8 hours yesterday trying to scan 35 mm slides. My opinion is similar to yours — a lot of time adjusting without much success. Can you recommend a good quality, reasonably priced scanner? I have aboutr 12,000 slides of a lifetime to address!
Thank you.
Comment — June 4, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
Thanks so much for your review and also to Judy. I was considering buying this, but will now be able to save myself a boatload of grief. I’m looking for something to scan microfilm rolls of an old newspaper, and thought this might fit the bill because the filmstrips don’t have to be cut into images of six.
Comment — December 27, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
Judy, I’ve been using the Canon Canoscan 8600F, and am happy with it, but I have to cut my filmstrips into six-exposure segments, which is a concern, as P. Mitchell also states above. Lately, I’ve kept seeing ads for these diminutive scanners like the Ion 35mm USB scanner, which say they’re fast and give you 5-megapixel resolution, and would like to try one out, but it looks like they’re only for PC users (I use a Mac) and you might also need to cut the film into smaller strips. I’ll stick with my Canoscan 8600F, since it’s worked just fine for me so far.
Comment — December 27, 2008 @ 5:06 pm