The Microtek
Film and Slide
Scanner
From around £129 with measuruements of 268mm x 66mm X 16mm (LxWxH) and weighing 750 gramms , the Microtek Filmscan is an ideal way of scanning your old negatives and slide films on to computer as up to 1800 dip resolution.
Inside the box you get a mains adapter, a power connecting lead and a USB connecting lead. There is a small booklet in various languages and a CD containing drivers etc. for PC (plug-in for Mac) and photo software. Mine came with Presto Page Manager Deluxe (with image folio). Mr Photo Gold (with photo album).
The scanner itself is larger than it looks in the illustration. It is about the size of a box of paper hankies. There is a lid at the front which opens up. Inside is a slide/film carrier which takes either a mounted slide or a negative film strip.
Software
The only piece of software you need to make the scanner work is "Cyberview". All the other things are more or less useless in my estimation. If you have photoshop or other software, you can access the scanner from there.
Cyberview installs in the same way as any other USB driver software, such as for the Epson printer or whatever. When you have installed the Cyberview driver software there is a "Cyberview" plug in with the icon of an "E". You copy this to the "plug-ins" folder of the application (photo software) you wish to use. I held down the option (alt) key and copied this file to the "Acquire/Export" folder in the "plug ins" folder in the PhotoDeluxe folder. This worked, but I got an out of memory error on my old machine running a 1GZH with180 Megs of memory - but I don't get this on my new machine that has 3GHZ with 1GB of memory.
If you have installed the plug in correctly into the relevant PhotoDeluxe folder, then you can activate the scanner from within PhotoDeluxe by clicking on the "other" icon of a video camera. If something goes wrong this icon becomes a stop sign.
You can activate the scanner by software control, or by pressing the "scan" button on the front of the unit. It saves a TIFF file in the folder you specify. You can then load this into the application you normally use such as PhotoDeluxe, PhotoShop, Graphic Convertor or whatever is your usual poison.
I scanned a negative and took a printout onto photo quality paper using my old Epson Stylus 880 printer. I then compared the results with a photo made from the same negative. Detail was good, but with a greenish cast. I think you could correct this with a bit of work. For a once off, the results were acceptable. Then I scanned a slide and printed the image onto cheap inkjet paper. Results were acceptable, but lacking in colour saturation. However, I think you could correct this by more than one trial.
I set the resolution to 1800 dpi. This produces fairly good results. You can't tell the printed image from a regular print made from the same negative from the point of view of resolution. You may need to do a bit of work to get the colour and saturation correct.
The default setting of 100 dpi and the default gamma setting produces appalling results and you immediately think you've been sold a pup! However, if you set the gamma contrast and colour by hand then you can forget about returning the unit to the shop. The Microtek Filmscan seems to be the cheapest film scanner which works with the iMac on the market.
The unit appears mainly intended for scanning negatives. In the set-up you can set it to the type of film; Kodak, Fiji, etc. I found that setting this to Kodak produced the best results. For scanning slides there are no options apart from "positive". Negatives are automatically turned positive.egatives are automatically turned positive.
If you have any questions about any products on this site, please to email me and I will do my best to help you
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