digital photography

Pacific Image PrimeFilm
1800AFL 35mm Film Scanner

Rating:

By Joel Shore

Digital cameras are swell, but what about those thousands of negatives you have from decades of shooting rolls of 35mm film? You could scan the prints made long ago from those negatives—if you have any that aren't torn or creased—or you could scan the negatives themselves. That would be the smart thing to do. What you need isn't a flatbed scanner, but a film scanner.

I tried the new PrimeFilm 1800 AFL from Pacific Image Electronics. (AFL stands for Auto Film Loader.) This neat product loads and feeds 35mm film strips and roll film and scans them, without lifting a finger. And it does it for a mere $399. It even works with individually mounted slides.

If you're a Web page creator, amateur photographer, just want to make greeting cards, or even a mid-level business user, you'll find the 1800AFL perfectly adequate. If you're a graphic arts professional, designing for print publication, you might want to look for a more industrial-strength solution.

Installation and connection to a USB port was pretty straightforward, but the meager printed instructions and on-screen messages have lost something in their translation to English. Misspelled and missing words plague the 16-page manual. I found that to be a real disappointment. In addition to the printed seven-language manual, there was a one-page addendum printed on what seems like tissue paper, and a seven-page stapled quick-start guide. One page was upside down.

PC users can choose a TWAIN-compliant driver; Macintosh users can select a plug-in.

The unit's side-mounted auto film loader handles cut film strips or rolls of up to 40 exposures without the need for film holders. You just stick the film in an opening in the side of the unit, and you can, well, set it and forget it. Film strips must be at least three frames long to work with the feeder. You can cut short strips into individual frames and temporarily mount them using the included reusable frames.

After the film is loaded, it is “pre-scanned.” That's a fast low-resolution scan that previews all of the images on your screen. From the preview, you select the images you want, click ok, and the unit goes starts its more exacting—and slower—high-resolution final scan. To ensure the best possible results, you also get to choose the exact film type from a lengthy list, such as Kodak Gold 400 or Fuji 800.

If you have mounted film, usually slides or transparencies, you simply open a door on the front of the unit and insert the slide.

Even though the unit is compact, you'll need quite a bit of open space in order to use it comfortably. That's because film strips must be fed into an opening on the right side of the machine. If the feed mechanism was in the front of the unit instead of the side, you'd be able to stick it on your desktop and butt it up next something else, like your monitor, speakers, or PC.

Once you save the scanned images to your hard drive, CD-R, or other device, you can use your favorite photo-editing software to edit them as you would any image from a digital camera. The main difference is that you'll probably spend a lot of time editing out the dust specks and scratches that have built up over the years.

Included with the PF 1800AFL is Photoshop Elements from Adobe. This software handles red-eye removal and a host of other editing functions. Of course, you can use any image-editing application.

The PF 1800AFL is the kind of product that most of us consumers would never think of buying. But if your memories are important to you, here's an affordable way of bringing them into the digital age.<