Product Reviews

Anyone who scans 35mm slides has a limited range of options. The choice is either to buy a transparency adaptor for a flatbed scanner and accept less-than-perfect results, or shell out substantially more money for a dedicated slide scanner. However, Microtek has produced a slide scanner which costs less than a mid-range flatbed plus transparency adaptor.

The Microtek 35t plus is a single-pass, 30-bit device which can scan 35mm slides, either mounted or in film strips, at optical resolutions up to 1950dpi. Slide scanners are designed to be compact, and at 135mm by 180mm by 250mm, the 35t plus will fit on any desk with ease.

Mounted slides are inserted into a slot on the top of the case and film strips pass through the sides from right to left. The slides are easily positioned and securely held in place by metal clips. The Power and Ready indicators are on the left of the mounted slide slot. The rear of the casing houses the power socket, a push-button SCSI ID selector, 50-pin and 25-pin SCSI ports, and the On/Off switch. The 35t plus comes with a 25-to-50 SCSI cable, which means that it can be placed first in a chain, and further SCSI devices can be accommodated via the 25-pin port, removing the need to buy an additional 50-to-50 SCSI cable.

The bundled software comprises Microtek's Scanwizard plug-in, a limited edition version of OmniPage, Colour It!, and Acrobat Reader to enable viewing of the online documentation.

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Installation of scanner and software is fairly straightforward, as long as you are careful to select the correct version of Scanwizard for the 35t plus. Selection of Scanwizard for the 35t at installation resulted in our Mac not recognising the scanner. The distribution of the documentation in PDF format makes life doubly difficult, as referring to it while trying to operate the scanner is a chore.

Once installed, the 35t plus should be colour calibrated. This can be done using the Kodak slide and colour calibration software supplied. Calibration can be done automatically, according to the manual, but manual calibration proved more successful.

Scanning is pleasingly swift. The 35t plus will scan a mounted 35mm slide, or one frame of a film strip, at 1950dpi in less than a minute. In fact, the slowest part of the process is selecting the Scanwizard plug-in from the Acquire menu in Photoshop. When selected, Scanwizard opens as a separate application, which is time-consuming and tedious. This is made worse by the fact that it automatically closes once the scan begins.

The quality of the images produced is more than adequate for a scanner of this price, and as a desktop alternative to a flatbed fitted with a transparency adaptor, it performs very well.

At £699, many people who buy the ScanMaker 35t plus will be new to slide scanners. As such, its ease of use is important and anyone who has used a flatbed scanner before will have no trouble. As a tool for scanning slides for multimedia applications and Web pages, it is excellent value. For anything less than professional print publication of an image which has been enlarged by more than 400%, it offers very good quality.

However, any piece of hardware is only as good as the software which drives it, and this is where the 35t plus lets itself down. That aside, the ScanMaker 35t plus has everything to recommend it, and its attraction is all the greater because it is priced significantly below most of its rivals.