Thanks for the heads up on the plustek

I am giving up on film scanners on ebay, even the coolscan 3 is suddenly going for over 100

I think I will try to find a flatbed with a good tray (since i do have lots of old film and slides)

I heard that for slides theres often "height" issues for getting clear scans, but i have far less slides than i have film...

Let me know how the 4990 pans out

I'll look at it but will also look at older ones that got good reviews 1-2 years ago. After all its mostly amateur efforts some taken while i was still learning. I do want to see what i did over the years though

I've seen ebay do that to people.

I always check prices in stores and "real" websites and so often have i seen people pay more than you can get from a "proper" store if you search a bit.

Was looking at some of the canon point and shoot digitals and saw lots of people pays near 130 for a powershot 540 when you can get it for 115 incl. vat and shipping from euroffice and probably cheaper other places.

I think it's the perception you're getting the bargain (the ebay ads often live on RRP, or give the RRP from 5 years ago as if it was still current)

But then I am always shocked... why is everything always so much more expensive in the UK? What's wrong with you people that shops all over the country can get away with charging more than they do in the netherlands or germany? It cant all be VAT, can it?

looking at my "didnt win" auctions:

- the coolscan iv typically sells just around £170-200, last one i tried sold abut 175 i think. Is it worth this much?

- the coolscan III goes for £70-120

- the dimage scan dual iv usually shoots near £250

- the scan multi pro shoots above £500.

- the canoscans go in the 150-250 too

- the dimage 5400 and 5400 II both go higher, £250-350 for the 5400 and could be anything for the 5400 II, people really want one it seems.

To compare the "cheap" plustek 7200i costs £165 new from amazon and has had ok reviews, and several of the flatbeds are under £100

I cant quite get myself to spend 250 at the moment with all the other stuff i need to buy. This kind of leaves things like the ls2000 or the coolscan III and the scan multi, scan multi 2, scan multi 3 - thats going quite old and I fear that i might have the problem i had with my X6 - no working XP drivers...

(On my X6 i tried several scsi cards which had drivers, and the system would see the card and even see the scanner now and then. But the twain integration just never worked, neither silverfast nor the microtek software ever owrked happily on xp (i did buy the thing in 98 or 99). I'm sure the scanner *works* still but i cannot use it)

Yes, i dont care about resolution all that much - anything less than 4 or 5 years old is probably plenty good enough.

A few images might deserve better treatment but I will figure that out once I have scanned them once.

I did think that the £90 lide 600 might be a good enough start, though. Not production quality but ?

Although if it is easier to work through slides on a dedicated scanner than with a tray, I'll have to take your word for it having never attempted either.

Will see what i can find for old scanners then. time to list yours on ebay

PS: what is it with windows and scsi - isnt it just that you have to get a decent aspi driver or something? My scsi X6 never worked on XP but I figured it was the software (they dont let you download the newer stuff, neither microtek or silverfast), because the hardware sure was recognised and showed up. Is there really a problem on XP?

I'm going through the scanner buying process and finding it hard to put down the £500 a good dedidated film scanner starts at. I also need a flatbed cause my old microtek has died, that is mostly for documents though, not high quality photos.

so my options seem to be...

* a decent flatbed with trannie tray - both epson and canon seem to have done quite a few models over the years and some older ones are still available cheap and new. the epson 4490, 4990, HP 4370, 4850, 4890 Canon 600f 4400 8400 8600 - or even the previous models as the improvements could be just pixel count (or not).

* a cheap slide/film scanner such as the 7200/7200i + a cheap entry level flatbed

* an old dedicated slide/film scanner + a cheap entry level flatbed. My worries is to pay £100 for an old coolscan or minolta and have something that's actually less good than a cheaper but more recent model?

I'm leaning towards the first at the moment

I have a lot of film, years and years worth of it, and I want something that allows me to scan through them reasonably fast and get decent quality. Then I can look through all of them and figure out how many I have which really deserve a better treatment - that will then tell me whether I actually can justify buying a better device or just pay to have the few really nice ones scanned better.