Review on Pacific Image PrimeFilm Slide Scanner by Greg Bellman

Top notch scanner compromised by second class software and fiddly USB interface. As the saying goes, you don't get what you don't pay for. The good news is that the downsides are surmountable if you're patient. The included software doesn't support all scanner features like multiple exposure for maximum scan quality (requires an update, I went straight to VueScan to use my Linux box for scanning). The scanner's USB interface seemed to be on the edge of USB 2.0 specifications and hung when plugged into a USB 3 port on my laptop. Luckily I still had the old pre-USB3 laptop and it worked reliably with the scanner I had gotten so far. The only remaining obstacle is the choice between scan quality and scan speed. You can get just one or the other with this scanner, not both, but hey, you're paying less than $500 even after buying a copy of VueScan and an old PC. To get great scans, you need to enable multiple exposures (for maximum depth) and multiple scans (to minimize scan noise). If you set the number of samples to 3, maximum resolution (10K x 10K, although the scanner actually only has 5K x 10K) and 64-bit RGBI, scanning a 35mm slide takes at least 20 minutes and some Slides longer than 2 hours. No idea why the times are different but it seems to be related to the overall density of the slide, all the long scans so far have been dark slides with lots of shadow detail. There are tutorials on the web on how to optimally set up VueScan for the highest quality scans. After several hundred slides scanned, I am very satisfied with the quality of the scan. I finally have a scanner that gets the best out of my slides instead of degrading them.