Plustek Opticfilm 120 Pro Multiformat Scanner coming soon

[Tom Kershaw]

I got both the long and short glas holders, but newton rings and extra dust!

- I've had to abandon scanning with the "full glass" option at the moment with the current warm weather; as I suffer from Newton's rings most of the time with this option. A while ago I managed to accidentally dissolve the adhesive attaching the scanning glass to the carrier while cleaning, and so for the moment I'm taping the film into position with the supposedly anti-Newton ring glass on top and leaving the lower glass out.

 

[dutchsteammachine]

- I've had to abandon scanning with the "full glass" option at the moment with the current warm weather; as I suffer from Newton's rings most of the time with this option. A while ago I managed to accidentally dissolve the adhesive attaching the scanning glass to the carrier while cleaning, and so for the moment I'm taping the film into position with the supposedly anti-Newton ring glass on top and leaving the lower glass out.

Hmm, I've been messing around with the normal non-glas 120 holder, removing the two clamps and just putting a single piece of AN glas ontop. It works fairly well, actually. But gravity does make the film curve down slightly sometimes. What I actually need is AN glas on the bottom with clamps at the top. So gravity actually flattens the film.

How does no glass at bottom work for you with the glas holder?

I have been thinking of removing the pads on bottom and top of the clamps of the glassless 120 holder and replace them with double sided adhesive tape. Then I can stick film to it and stretch one of the clamps out to pull the film flat. I do this times, but sometimes the current weak rubber pads slip. But when it works, it is perfectly flat without any glass at all! and easy to clean dust of because the film is under pressure.

 

[Bormental]

Ok, my Plustek 120 Pro arrived and I spent a few hours playing with it. I will refrain from posting samples here until I develop confidence in myself doing everything right (we don't want to wonder about the dreaded "operator error" do we?). I will post a mini-review with some samples in a separate thread, meanwhile I can share some initial impressions.

• The speed is not an issue, especially for color. If you have a consistently exposed roll, you spend some time creating a frame profile and once you apply it to 12 frames and set it to batch scanning mode, you'll be light-touching 16-bit TIFFs at about the same speed as they're coming off the scanner. This feels like 3x speed up vs my DSLR scanning routine where color inversion takes a lot of time.
• To zoom in on this: even with my very limited experience with this hardware and with Silverfast I am getting acceptable colors much, much faster than doing manual inversion & correction from a DSLR raw. This is going to be a huge time saver for medium format.
  
• Silverfast, while ugly, is quite intuitive in my opinion, especially if you have experience with other image editing tools (RAW converters, Photoshop, etc).
  
• I can already tell that for 35mm B&W scanning I will continue to use my DLSR rig as it's much, much faster.
• I am seeing a lot more dust on negatives vs DSLR scanning method. I will have to investigate this further, but it feels like the dust is getting on the negs as they're entering the scanner. 80% of my negatives require zero dust attention when I scan with a DSLR, my environment is sterile, so I am a bit puzzled by this.
• As it scans, the noise drives me nuts... I will see if I can place it in a separate room or at least wear some headphones with music blasting.
• I have not done focus calibration yet, but I am already getting better resolution than $40/roll Noritsu scans from my local lab. Will later look into the focusing some more.

As I get more comfortable with software, I will post some full-res scans in a separate thread here.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

The speed is not an issue, especially for color. If you have a consistently exposed roll, you spend some time creating a frame profile and once you apply it to 12 frames and set it to batch scanning mode, you'll be light-touching 16-bit TIFFs at about the same speed as they're coming off the scanner. This feels like 3x speed up vs my DSLR scanning routine where color inversion takes a lot of time.

Is this medium format film? I was timing some 6x7cm scans (colour negative) earlier with the Coolscan, although the computers I currently have working with a Firewire connection are rather old and low powered, so saving data from memory into storage I consider separately.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

How does no glass at bottom work for you with the glas holder?

Flatness seems to vary from very good to not great depending on the film. I'm mostly scanning fairly freshly processed film at the moment so I'm not sure how film placed underneath some heavy books etc. would fair. My use at the moment is prominently for good quality web display; obviously large scale prints would be more exacting.

Most of the content on my website is film scanned with the Coolscan 9000.

 

[Billy Axeman]

Ok, my Plustek 120 Pro arrived and I spent a few hours playing with it. .....

Thanks for your update.

A possible source for the dust could be the negative holders. They are plastic isn't it? Plastic is attracting dust like hell. I wonder if you can open the scanner for a cleanup.

I use noise cancelling headphones when I must work in a noisy environment.

 

[Lachlan Young]

I am seeing a lot more dust on negatives vs DSLR scanning method. I will have to investigate this further, but it feels like the dust is getting on the negs as they're entering the scanner. 80% of my negatives require zero dust attention when I scan with a DSLR, my environment is sterile, so I am a bit puzzled by this.

This may have as much to do with the nature of the light source & how collimated it is, as opposed to actually how dusty the negs really are.

I have not done focus calibration yet, but I am already getting better resolution than $40/roll Noritsu scans from my local lab. Will later look into the focusing some more.

Given that the Noritsu maxes out around 1800-2300ppi (I recall) for various 120 formats, this is hopeful news - what I'd really like to see is an uninverted colour neg, nothing clipped on the histogram, with a bit of neg rebate - which will make it possible to properly test the noise level, colour etc of the scanner independent of whatever Silverfast does.

 

[Bormental]

@Lachlan Young sounds good, Silverfast has a "raw" option which turned out to be a linear 16-bit TIFF with a separate infrared layer. Will post that as well.