Hi Shane,

I'm always rather sceptical of the plustek brand in scanners. They have tended to be cheap and nasty in the past, with results which you could better using a half decent flatbed. I have no direct experience of this model, but I notice from your post that the optics used are not mentioned. My cynical mind therefore leads me to suspect that the lens is probably made by the lowest bidder and fixed focus. All the best film scanners are made by optics companies and have high quality auto focus lenses. For example, the best film scanners are usually said to be those made by Nikon, Canon and Minolta.

The quoted resolution is probably not useful because it is just related to the density of pixels on the CCD line and the step size of the motors. Given that the best scanners from Minolta and Nikon quote a top resolution of around 5400dpi, I find it unlikely that a budget model can hit 7200 with any useful results. If that kind of resolution could be usefully achieved then you can bet that the top of the range Nikons would do it with their £1000+ price tags.

I have owned a Minolta Scan Dual IV for a few years and it has served me well although it is now on it's last legs. At £250 it wasn't cheap, but neither was it the £500 asking price for a Nikon. I'm not sure if the Minolta range of scanners is still made but it might be an option if you can get one.

Another option which I would think superior to a cheap film scanner is a higher end flatbed. I have recently been looking at the Epson 4490 Photo which seems to get good reviews and can batch scan 2 strips of negs at once.


With regard to what Manesty said, he may have been a little abrupt but he does have a point. Personally I don't care if your grammar and spelling is not perfect (I know mine aren't!), but it makes your posts a lot easier to read if you at least split up the ideas with some whitespace. This benefits you because people are more inclined to read a post which is easy to read, and if they read it they may well reply with useful info.

Agree with this totally, be honist about what you have done or not done to a photo and no-one can complain. We are artists after all, there is a little something called "artistic license".

A friend of mine is such a purist he umms and arrrs over the allowability of cropping an image to fit a given sheet of paper, always prints at 3:2 ratio even in the dark room. Obviously he and I differ on some key points, but he's still a good photographer (well, as good as me anyway, which doesn't say a lot but he knows which end to look through!)

My choice, and others may have a better way which I'd love to hear about, would be to duplicate the layer and then use a mask to remove everything but the rock from the top layer. This works great on things like rocks, when it comes to trees and people hair and leaves make matters harder.

or if you don't mind manual focus and want something that turns up on Ebay more often, the Tamron 90mm adaptall lenses are very nice indeed. I have the early 90mm F2.5 version with a matched flat field converter. Set me back the princely sum of £50, and even though prices have since gone a bit mad you should be able to get one for less than £100. Only problem with them is the KA mount is hard to come by.

I've noticed a few times lately that shots I thought were square in the VF have come out leaning, I thought it was just me being dumb

many congratulations Pete! just a shame they couldn't find a decent camera to give out as a prize......still could be worse, at least it's not a Canon! lol

I had a DVD from amazon last Christmas which was scratched. They were very good about it and replaced the whole box set very quickly.

I'm sure if you contact them they will be very concerned about this and will replace the faulty/fake cart.

Agreed, improved manufacturing techniques have made multi-coating a lot cheaper and easier to do, and I didn't mean it to be taken as a fact, just a strong hunch.

my objection is mainly that I would like them to say what they mean.

All of the above listed features are clearly desirable in a high quality filter, whether it's for film, digital or an optical tele/microscope, but as far as I can see none of them is inherently "digital". The term is meaningless in this context, and is simply tagged onto things in much the same way "automatic" once was, to make the product sound high tech.

Since the term in relation to filters is at best poorly defined, I ignore it. Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but there's nothing on that list which couldn't have been done 5 or even 10 years ago.

The only thing which may have changed is the exact composition of the multi-coating, and I would still be willing to bet that a Pentax SMC filter from 10 years ago has better coating than a Jessops Digital filter today.

yeah the digitals can't pick up the Aperture unless it's on A. Strange that, because I'm pretty sure my MZ-7 can, I suppose it must require simultaneous use of an aperture coupler and digital contacts. Either that or I'm just miss-remembering, my MZ-7 is at my parents house which is about 80 miles from here so checking isn't really an option.