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ROC color restoration is very impressive when it guesses right.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
PrimeFilm 3650 slide and negative scanner: Built-in defect cleanup at a good price
Sept. 5, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
I jumped at the chance to buy a PrimeFilm 1800u slide and negative scanner when it was introduced a few years ago. Picture quality was impressive and the price, about $150 at discount, was hard to beat.
The company's lineup still includes the 1800u. (The "u" in any Prime Film model indicates a scanner made for U.S. electrical requirements.) It's still the best choice for anyone who wants to get started with scanning 35mm slides or negatives without a big expense. It connects through a USB cable and works with both Windows and Macintosh computers.
But the new star of the PrimeFilm lineup is the 3650u, which costs about $340. It's the size of a desktop dictionary, a little larger than the svelte 1800u, and scans at 3600 dots per inch. That's twice the maximum actual resolution of the 1800u. (Scanner manufacturers often play a numbers game with resolution, listing interpolated numbers in addition to actual, optical resolution figures. The 3650u has a genuine optical resolution of 3600 dpi.)
The 3650u connects by a USB cable, and will work with both a standard USB 1.1 connection and a newer, higher-speed USB 2 port. It comes with Windows and Apple Macintosh driver software, but buyers should check for an updated driver before using the scanner. I located new drivers quickly at the company's site,
www.scanace.com/en/product/PF3650u.php. I hooked the scanner up to my Apple Macintosh G4, using USB 1.1, and to my wife's newer iMac, using USB 2.0. Scanning using USB 2.0 speeds was a delight.
PrimeFilm scanners are not flatbed models. They're specifically designed to get the most out of 35mm negatives and slides but cannot scan such objects as magazine pages or photos. Likewise, flatbed scanners cannot do a good job scanning negatives and slides. A PDF document available on the PrimeFilm site explains this well, or you can check any of my previous columns on slide and negative scanning for my arguments against dual-use flatbed scanners. (Use SCANNER as the search term in my site's search form.)
High resolution at a fair price is just part of the attraction of the 3650u. Like many much more expensive scanners, the 3650u comes standard with Digital ICE, a hardware-based defect eliminator. It also has two other functions that add to the scanner's abilities, a "Reconstruction of Color" (ROC) module and a "Grain Equalization Management" (GEM) module. The three extra functions can be turned off at any time.
The 3650u uses a recent version of Digital ICE called Digital ICE 3 ("ice cubed" -- get it?). It uses an infrared beam to detect scratches, dust and dirt on the film and then subtracts the flaws from the scanned image. This worked almost like magic on most negatives, but actually degraded the images in scans I made of Kodak Kodachrome slides. (Kodak, which owns the patents for Digital ICE, says Kodachrome slide film is not compatible with Digital ICE. Dye clouds in Kodachrome apparently confuse the infrared sensor.)
The two other special features worked on all the negatives and slides I tried them on.
ROC, which I interpreted as meaning "Restore Old Color" because that was easier to remember, is very impressive when it guesses right -- about a third of the time when I scanned 50-year-old slides -- and the resulting improvements in color rendition would be quite hard to accomplish manually.
GEM, the film-grain reduction feature, cut down on image detail when I used it too aggressively, but it cleaned up grainy negatives better than any of the software methods I've tried.
Scans at 3600 dpi can be printed at poster size if the images themselves are sharp enough. I sized my scans at 14 inches by 11 inches in most cases, with excellent results on my Epson 2000P printer.
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