Conclusion

For its price, the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 is a very capable desktop film scanner. 3600ppi scans are sharp and detailed, printing well up to A3 size (depending on the quality of the originals, of course). Scanning at 7200ppi offers no noticeable benefit and is therefore unnecessary. The scanner's dMax of 3.6 may not sound like a lot but the Multi-Exposure feature does help you eek out a bit of extra detail from your most contrasty slides. SilverFast's NegaFix profiles, while not perfect, do help you get the colours right when scanning colour negative films. The lack of an infrared channel means SilverFast's iSRD feature cannot be used with this scanner but the software-based SRD function can sometimes prove surprisingly effective. Manual film advance and relatively long scan times at high resolution settings mean the OpticFilm 8100 is not the ideal tool for archiving truly large film collections but if you only need to digitise a moderate amount of slides and negatives, we have no reservations recommending it to you.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	3.5
Ease-of-use	4
Image quality	5
Value for money	4

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