Scanning 35 mm film with Plustek OpticFilm 7600i - First impressions

What kind of results and quality can you expect to get when scanning 35 mm negatives using a hobby based scanner?

This depend on the quality of the film, the scanner you use, the scanner software and many other factors.

The photo in this article is from a scanned negative. It is typical of the result I get using a Plustek OpticFilm 7600i and the Silverfast scanner software that comes bundled with the scanner when you buy it.



This negative is scanned in a high resolution (5032x3379 pixels, i.e. higher resolution than many digital SLR cameras). That means the full size of the resulting photo is roughly 3 times my 24 inch screen if viewed in 100% size on the screen! This is a bit overkill really, but I do prefer to scan in a higher resolution than I feel I really do need. The film is 200 ASA.

Here is the full photo (not full resolution though. This one is resized to 1024px width)

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This is a cropped version

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And here is a small detail in full resolution

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This 35 mm negative photo has some bad scratch marks, and I did use the hardware base scratch removal of the scanner. You can still see some of the scratches going horizontally. Sometimes the scratch removal works wonders and there are almost no traces left. In other photos, they can still be visible - as in this photo.

Still - Much better than not using scratch removal!