PowerFilm

I bought this because I have hundreds of rolls of film that I'd like digitized. I was attracted by the idea of batching a roll at a time, and getting high-res scans.This product ultimately did that, and more. Many of my negatives have not withstood the test of time, and the colors have faded. They have a color-enhance feature in their software that really helps restore faded negatives. It scans 6 strips of 4 pix each in less than 10 minutes on the highest resolution (24 MP). It actually takes longer (50% longer?) if you create JPEG's, because of the compression part. I don't care about disc space as much as I do my time, so I've been using TIFF format.Here's why I say they have great customer service: the first two copies of this machine I got had dust problems. There was something on the scanners that left a stripe through the picture. There was no way to clean it off. I sent the first one back, and tried again. Remember, I haven't even found anything that purports to do what I want for anything close to this price. So I really wanted to like this. When the second copy failed, I started the support dance with Amazon, and they were understandably useless. But they put me in touch with a woman at the company, who was fabulous. I emailed her some scanned pix, and she made me this offer: I would return the one I had, and she would send me one that she had personally checked out, right from her office. She did that, and my third copy of this scanner worked great.Her name is Wendy, but she assures me that everyone there is as responsive as she is.If you're going to spend the money for this, I suggest you also spring for a light table (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y21WQYQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) for $40 so you can examine the negatives for dirt etc., and a bulb-style dust remover (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UYQ1HUM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) for $6. If you don't have archival quality sleeves for your negatives (i.e. if you're still using the envelope that the drug store put them in 40 years ago) I recommend getting something like these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009R90M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1. Also get gloves with which to handle the negatives, e.g.:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YDA004E/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and get some emulsion cleaning solution (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SYHWAJK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) and some lint-free wipes (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001M6K24/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1). All of this totals about $70 and is well worth it. Since you're trying to save time, getting clean negatives will avoid having to scan them twice.The sticklers out there will say that their quality control must be bad if it took three tries, and I would tend to agree. But if you're facing a project like mine, and many of you are, this is by far the best option.

I was so excited to get this and digitize negatives. If it worked it may be worth it. Don't buy this expecting it will be fast. Slow as molassas. The scratch removal is pretty good. The software keeps erroring and crashing. You may have 45 minutes into a batch scan and it chokes on the last strip. Frustrating as hell. Keeps trying to take more than one negative at a time. The quality when it does work is very average. I am very disappointed and I have spent so much time trying to make it work.

The media could not be loaded. My thoughts and observations - updated...The CyberView PF135 software that I downloaded from the site, to allow me to scan neg's, is very simple to use, and fairly basic in its abilities, but it produces good enough results.One thing that I'm finding very irritating is, if there are more than 6, or less than 3 frames on the piece of film, the software thinks that there's an error in the loading/running of the film through the device, and rejects the full scan.It would be nice to not have to recut old sets of film before they can be scanned, and be able to scan single frame pieces so that there was a full film story, by telling the software to expect a longer or shorter bit of film.Saying that, the scanner will do a preview in a very sensible time, and if you then do a high res scan it takes the same length of time in the scanner, but the software then takes significantly longer to interpolate the data on the computer.The feed motor is I think a stepper motor, and not at all quiet, when scanning a lot of film and processing at the same time, the noise becomes increasingly wearying, see the video I've attached that gives you and idea, where you can also see the speed of the film feed...

Pros:* You can just put your entire roll (in strips of 6) in the scanner and walk away* Image quality is very usable (I'd still use my Minolta 5400 if I wanted to print a frame really big, but I imagine those'll be rare casesCons:* The ICE (magic touch) feature doesn't always work very well, and can produce weird artifacts.* The provided software doesn't let you save the scanner unprocessed (I'd prefer to invert using ColorPerfect myself)* Vuescan supports it, but it can only do one strip at a time, and the multi frame cropping is totally broken, so scanning Raw is not very practical (but the scanner's automatic negative inversion is fine, so it doesn't bother me very much).* It's open on top, so I think it'll gather dust easily. I've only had it for a day though, so it's just an assumption.Overall, huge workflow improvement. Won't need to take a day off to scan my backlog anymore.

I have been using this for a few days now and 1) Can not make multiples exposure work. It loads the film, ejects the film and hangs the connection to the computer. Mac Catalina. The support has not responded in 5 days other than asking for version numbers and telling me engineers are reviewing. 2) Program crashes regularly and leaves file system in a corrupted state where the directory containing scans is locked from the OS and other devices can not see the directories. Bad coding! On restart there is a message that a lock file is removed but the files are not accessible on any other computer on the network. Not a permission issue. In general the device seems better than its software and the tech support response for a $800 product is terrible. Will probably return.