As you all know I have recently gotten back into film photography or as it was known when I started photography. for the past 20 years I have been doing digital photography. Once I started to use digital cameras I never looked back to film, as using it had kept me poor for a long time. I did not realise when digital came along that it would really change the photography industry in more ways than I could count. How that I have found that I want to use film I have discovered that what I need is a hybrid workflow. As much as I would love to set up a darkroom for now I am not going to be doing that however I can now merge digital photography methods with those of Film photography. I am fortunate that about 10 years ago Epson was rather generous towards me and gave me both an Epson 3800 printer and an Epson v750 scanner. The scanner still works after all these years Epson to its credit has kept the drivers available and updated them when the software has required them to do so.

My workflow for my film photography will be to process my film at home using my own darkbag and processing tanks to load the film into and process, hang the film to dry then I will scan my negatives using the flatbed scanner to make proof sheets like I used to create in the darkroom. Once that is done I can make selections and then I need to make high resolution scans to be able to output my images. Once I have high resolution scans I can then post images online and also print them either via www.prinspace.co.uk or using my as yet to be fixed Epson printer (that will be the subject of another days article).

So right now I am looking at film scanners and the one that I would have got if it was still available was made originally by Imacon who eventually brought out Hasselblad and renamed their scanners for a while Hasselblad. As these scanners stopped being made in 2019 and they were never a mass market scanner they are really hard to find and super expensive second hand. Oh and as they their software is not getting updated need to be run on an old computer. So realistically they are not a viable option anymore for film scanning. Which has lead me to looking at Plustek line of scanners. They make a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE and a Plustek OpticFilm 8300i SE now this is where it gets interesting as they are not good at describing the difference between them on their website. It appears that they both have the same D-max range but one can go higher if you do multi scanning of the image and the other does not mention that.

You might now ask what is D-max and why do I care about that. As an explanation D-max refers to the dynamic range that the scanner is capable of recording in the negative, and the higher the D-max range the greater the amount of tones that a scanner can record. A great scanner would have a D-Max of 4.1 to 4.6 the Imacon/Hasselblad scanners used to achieve this. Right now the nearest I can see that is that is now possible is with either the Epson v750 with a Wet Scanning kit (you can see this in action with Raymond Parker) at 4.0 D-max or the Plustek line of scanners which is normally rate at 3.6 and with multi scanning at 3.9 D-max.

So my question to Plustek is can their Plustek OpticFilm 8300i SE actually in the real world achieve 3.9 D-max and how hard is it to use in multi scan mode, or is the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE the one to get at 3.6 D-max and does it have the multi scan mode or not as I can’t seem to find this info out at this point in time via their website.