Review on Opticfilm 7500I 7200 Silverfast Seplus by Chad Baio

I have owned photos, negatives and slides for 30 years, mostly in albums that have slowly decayed (have you looked at yours recently?). After asking about scanning at the photo store (cost: many dollars per slide! oops!), I decided to scan them myself. Right now I probably have close to a thousand slides in the works. I have an OpticFilm Plustek 7500i with SilverFast SE plus software. Although it was quite expensive, it's still cheaper than in the store. Here are my experiences so far: - I played around for a while to choose the resolution and options for scanning; eventually settled on 600 dpi 5.6 x 3.6 inch JPEG. A higher resolution is unbearably slow and takes up more disk space. I like both the scanner and the SilverFast software in terms of ergonomics when scanning thousands of slides: I usually let the software automatically select brightness, contrast, etc. (you have to set each slide to crop and the scan is still slow enough to write a review scanner while scanning!).- Forget about removing infrared dust and scratches - this requires an extra scan and the chances of the slide moving a fraction of an inch between scans are high, so the Dust may appear shifted toward the image. If you need to scan multiple slides this can be fine (just rescan) but I found a good brushing with a soft brush (both sides) was more effective. Overall an acceptable scanner (although I can't compare myself to others). I would like faster scanning and easier loading (but that would probably make it more expensive). Make sure you make some backup copies before throwing away your slides.