Image Quality

Resolution

7200ppi sounds like an awfully lot of resolution, and indeed, photographs scanned at this setting produce digital images of nearly 70 megapixels. But how much detail do they really contain? Let's find out!

Below is a scan of a frame shot on Kodak Ektar 100 using a sharp prime lens.

See that cardboard box in the middle? Well, take a closer look.

It's clear that even at 3600ppi, i.e. half its nominal maximum resolution, the scanner captures an amazing amount of detail. But can you see anything extra in the 7200ppi crop? At first it may seem that the word “Premium” in the S.C.B. logo is more legible in the higher-resolution scan but in reality the 7200ppi crop does not contain any meaningful additional detail versus the 3600ppi version. Our experiments with other finely-grained, sharp films have all confirmed that there is no real point in scanning at 7200ppi. Why could this be so? Well, I'm sure the scanner hardware – the CCD and the stepper motor – are capable of delivering true 7200ppi scans (otherwise the manufacturer wouldn't be able to claim so), but the scanner optics may not have enough resolving power to support them. Plus, the fact that it's a fixed-focus lens might also contribute to this. Nevertheless, the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 need not be ashamed of its performance. Au contraire - just remind yourself again how small a portion of the full frame we are peeping at here, and you'll agree that the Plustek is quite an achiever, especially at the price point it is being offered at.

Single versus Multi-exposure

Perhaps the most useful feature of SilverFast, supported by the Plustek OpticFilm 8100, is Multi-Exposure. If enabled, it allows the program to blend two differently exposed scans of the same slide  into a single digital image with improved shadow detail; essentially expanding the scanner's dynamic range. To see if the feature really works, we took a slightly underexposed Kodak EliteChrome EC 100 transparency and scanned it both with and without Multi-Exposure turned on.

The full frame

Next, we took a crop from the darkest part inside the tiny cabin / bus stop shelter. Here's what it looks like at 100% magnification, with Multi-Exposure turned off:

Not very nice, is it? Even though no pixel is pitch black, it's evident that the deepest shadows look very unnatural in this scan. Now, take a look at the Multi-Exposure version:

That's much better. Not drum scan quality to be sure, but based on what I'm seeing here I would definitely recommend that you turn this feature on whenever scanning a transparency or even a black-and-white negative with a high density range.

On a side note, Multi-Sampling has been dropped from SilverFast with the arrival of Version 8. LaserSoft claims this is because Multi-Exposure consistently yields better results. We've found this to be a bit baffling given that the purpose of Multi-Sampling was different to that of Multi-Exposure (it was mainly used to reduce scanner noise and grain aliasing), and we were sorry to see this feature go.

Scanning Black-and-white Film

As you can see from our sample images, we have scanned a number of black-and-white films with the Plustek OpticFilm 8100, including Ilford Pan 100, Kodak Academy 200 and Fortepan 400; and the scanner did a very good job. Some of these films have a much wider density range than colour print film but the OpticFilm 8100 had no problem capturing the entire tonal range from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows.

Of course if you think that the result is a little too flat, you can always add a bit of contrast in post:

But the point is that both shadow and highlight detail is there, should you like to do a bit of dodging and burning or any other kind of image manipulation in the digital darkroom.

Kodak Academy 200 shadow detail

Scan Times

Scan times with the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 depend on the resolution setting you choose as well as how much tweaking you do to your scans in SilverFast. Thanks to its LED light source, the scanner is ready as soon as you turn it on, with no warm-up time needed.  A prescan takes 18 seconds. Typical single-exposure scanning times are as follows:

1800ppi – 32 seconds
2400ppi – 40 seconds
3600ppi – 1 minute 30 seconds
Saving to TIFF format – 5 seconds

Enabling Multi-Exposure more than doubles the scanning time – a 3600ppi scan with Multi-Exposure takes 3 minutes and 40 seconds, with a further 37 seconds required for blending the two exposures. Enabling other features like SRD or GANE all take extra time. Taking into account that the film holder has to be advanced manually, this means that the OpticFilm 8100 is not the ideal tool for scanning really large film archives at high resolution settings.

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