ped
Small brown dog
Hi guys
I used to shoot a fair bit of film but I always disliked scanning. It was always there, looming in the distance; an unpleasant final stage of the journey after the pleasure of preparing, shooting and developing (made so much better with a Rondinax tank!)
In a renewed effort to shoot film again, I decided to try and find a scanner that'll do a whole roll of film, no cutting, no negative holders, no babysitting the scanner frame by frame. As long as the scanner does it all automatically, actual image quality is less of a priority. 'Good enough' is good enough.
My research pointed me towards a Pacific Image Primefilm 3600pro - there were a few on eBay at various prices. Bearing in mind I planned on using Vuescan and using it for B+W only, I put in a cheeky offer on one which was sold as 'working' but without the cables and PSU, which I had anyway (12v centre positive)
Well I'm pleased to report that on my desktop iMac (2012 running 10.15.7) it works perfectly, albeit with an older version of Vuescan (the current version crashes).
I'm really pleased - I'll post some scans here, but having compared some initial tests to the lab scans I received from my last roll, I'm confident I can do better - even the quick scans I tried were better than the overly contrasty scans I got back from a mail order service I used.
I wanted to post about it because I took a gamble buying it, and wasn't sure if it would work. I couldn't find many people talking about it for my use case and soft/hardware. So if it helps anyone, there it is.
It makes such a difference being able to shove the film in and leave it, then come back to a nice bunch of .Tiff files 🙂
Cheers
ped
I used to shoot a fair bit of film but I always disliked scanning. It was always there, looming in the distance; an unpleasant final stage of the journey after the pleasure of preparing, shooting and developing (made so much better with a Rondinax tank!)
In a renewed effort to shoot film again, I decided to try and find a scanner that'll do a whole roll of film, no cutting, no negative holders, no babysitting the scanner frame by frame. As long as the scanner does it all automatically, actual image quality is less of a priority. 'Good enough' is good enough.
My research pointed me towards a Pacific Image Primefilm 3600pro - there were a few on eBay at various prices. Bearing in mind I planned on using Vuescan and using it for B+W only, I put in a cheeky offer on one which was sold as 'working' but without the cables and PSU, which I had anyway (12v centre positive)
Well I'm pleased to report that on my desktop iMac (2012 running 10.15.7) it works perfectly, albeit with an older version of Vuescan (the current version crashes).
I'm really pleased - I'll post some scans here, but having compared some initial tests to the lab scans I received from my last roll, I'm confident I can do better - even the quick scans I tried were better than the overly contrasty scans I got back from a mail order service I used.
I wanted to post about it because I took a gamble buying it, and wasn't sure if it would work. I couldn't find many people talking about it for my use case and soft/hardware. So if it helps anyone, there it is.
It makes such a difference being able to shove the film in and leave it, then come back to a nice bunch of .Tiff files 🙂
Cheers
ped
