Pacific Image PrimeFilm 1800AFL Film Scanner (35 mm)

I paid about $250 for mine, had it 3 weeks, then returned it and will be receiving my 3600 PRO shortly. One thing that surprised me a little bit is that even though this scanner is one of the faster ones out there, scanning slides and film is a very time-consuming process! It requires quite a bit of attention to color balance and focus to get good scans. Besides that, I was looking for really crisp images off my well-focused slides. It just doesn't work like that - check any sub-$1000 scanner review images for your own comparison. I have a Great Olympus E-100RS 1.5 megapixel camera who's images are Easily sharper and with better color balance than 24 megapixel scanned slides with this scanner. That was very disappointing. However, I do have a lot of old family slides that I want to scan so I still feel that I cannot go any longer without a film scanner. I'm unwilling to pay $800 for a scanner so I'm hoping the 3600 PRO will do the job. I'll probably scan everything then sell the scanner. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Update 11-19-2002: Received the 3600 Pro. At $419 vs the 1800's $249, it is entirely worth the extra money. The colors are better, the images are more focused, etc. The only problem is that now I'm storing my images in TIFF format, 1800bpi resolution x 12-bit color. That makes each slide scan about 22MB! It takes roughly one minute to scan a slide at that resolution through USB 1.0. I may go to the 1394 interface soon. 3600bpi images are over 100MB - I don't think I'll ever use this scanner at maximum resolution.

The scanner installed and worked without a single problem. I have a 266MHz PC with 256MB RAM running Windows ME.

I'm just a picky amateur photographer.