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| 28th August 2001 | REVIEW: PRIMEFILM 1800U SCANNER |
Gavin Haines |
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The 1800u PrimeFilm comes in a box the size of a shoebox which is marked "Digitizing films made easy" What's in the box? Inside the box you get a mains adapter, a power connecting lead and a USB connecting lead. There is a small booklet in various languages and a CD marked "PrimeFilm1800U, Pacific Image Cyberview twain-compliant driver for PC (plug-in for Mac). Presto Page Manager Deluxe (with image folio). Mr Photo Gold (with photo album)." The scanner itself is larger than it looks in the illustration. It is about the size of a box of paper hankies. There is a lid at the front which opens up. Inside is a slide/film carrier which takes either a mounted slide or a negative film strip. Software The only piece of software you need to make the scanner work is "Cyberview". All the other things are more or less useless in my estimation. Cyberview installs in the same way as any other USB driver software, such as for the Epson printer or whatever. When you have installed the Cyberview driver software there is a "Cyberview" plug in with the icon of an "E". You copy this to the "plug-ins" folder of the application you wish to use. I held down the option (alt) key and copied this file to the "Acquire/Export" folder in the "plug ins" folder in the PhotoDeluxe folder. This worked, but I got an out of memory error, (may not apply to you, if you have an iMac with more memory). If you have installed the plug in correctly into the relevant PhotoDeluxe folder, then you can activate the scanner from within PhotoDeluxe by clicking on the "other" icon of a video camera. If something goes wrong this icon becomes a stop sign. You can activate the scanner by software control, or by pressing the "scan" button on the front of the unit. It saves a TIFF file in the folder you specify. You can then load this into the application you normally use such as PhotoDeluxe, PhotoShop, Graphic Convertor or whatever is your usual I scanned a negative and took a printout onto photo quality paper using the Epson Stylus 740. I then compared the results with a photo made from the same negative. Detail was good, but with a greenish cast. I think you could correct this with a bit of work. For a once off, the results were acceptable. Then I scanned a slide and printed the image onto cheap inkjet paper. Results were acceptable, but lacking in colour saturation. However, I think you could correct this by more than one trial. I set the resolution to 1800 dpi. This produces acceptable results. You can't tell the printed image from a regular print made from the same negative from the point of view of resolution. You may need to do a bit of work to get the colour and saturation correct. The default setting of 100 dpi and the default gamma setting produces appalling results and you immediately think you've been sold a pup! However, if you set the gamma contrast and colour by hand then you can forget about returning the unit to the shop. The PrimeFilm 1800u is the cheapest film scanner which works with the iMac on the market. The unit appears mainly intended for scanning negatives. In the set-up you can set it to the type of film; Kodak, Fiji, etc. For scanning slides there are no options apart from "positive". Negatives are automatically turned positive. The supplied applications software can be used to process images, but I found that it is quicker and easier to use PhotoDeluxe. The other programs you get are "PageManager", (often supplied with other makes of scanners, so not much good), "Mr Photo Gold" (worse than PhotoDeluxe), "PhotoAlbum" (also supplied with Umax scanners and Epson Printers, so also not much use) |
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