Saving photo slides [Resources_Tools]

If you\´re old enough to have been called a "shutterbug," you\´ve probably got a bunch of slides or film somewhere that you\´ve fantasized about digitizing. Well, a new scanner system, flawed though it is, may be what you\´re looking for. · Film scanning is recovering from a market implosion several years ago, when big players Canon, Minolta, and Nikon all either got out of the business or cut back their offerings. That left fewer than a dozen companies competing in the market for 35-mm film scanners. One of the most interesting of this group is Plustek Technology, whose new model, the OpticFilm 8200i Ai, offers impressive value. · Available now in stores for about US $430, it can scan at 7200 dots per inch—high enough to show the grain in a photograph, no matter how fine-grain the film is. Its image-sensing component is a charge-coupled-device combined with an LED light source. Like all film scanners, the Plustek is equally adept at scanning negatives and slides. · But good hardware is useless without good software. It\´s a big challenge for a scanner, because the software has to control so many variables, including spatial and color resolution, output format, and many optimization and correction parameters. The Plustek comes bundled with software called SilverFast, which is available for Microsoft Windows and Apple\´s OS X. · SilverFast has an intuitive user interface. It enabled me to control the key factors of a scan with few false starts and with minimal use of the thin and mediocre reference booklet that comes with the software. Unfortunately, however, I also encountered a significant bug. Every time I tried to make a scan with the highest color depth—64-bit—the software crashed. This instability surprised me, because the software is now on version 8. (I was running it on my powerful iMac computer.) · The Plustek scanner can perform several different kinds of scans, but they boil down to two- basic types. One is an "archival" scan, which strives to capture every detail and aspect of the slide as faithfully as possible.