Has anyone seen any review or know anything about Tamarack 2400FS film scanner or the PrimeFilm 1800i film scanner I am archiving 35mm slides and don't know if I should sacrifice to 1800dpi or stick solely with a 2400dpi scanner.. thanks. jburton@tctc.com

-- J Burton (jburton@tctc.com), June 13, 2000

Answers

I wouldn't count on archiving anything with 2400 dpi. I have one of these very inexpensive (and that't its one selling point) "Tamarack" = Artiscan = generic no-name Chinese scanners. It is better thought of as a thumbnail producer for your filing system, or a cheap scanner for web pages or images to be inserted into documents where small size is more important than reproduction quality. If you want something that can produce a good quality picture later (after all, the intent of archiving?) then this is not the scanner you want.

-- Les Gyug (les_gyug@telus.net), June 13, 2000.

I've got to wholeheartedly agre with the above response. I bought one of these Tamaracks in its Jenscan JS21 guise, purely on its specification. I had so many problems with it that it went back after 3 days for a refund. Don't do it.

I've now got an Acer Scanwit 2720s film scanner, and can't fault it for the money. There's a review of it here.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), June 14, 2000.

All I can add is total agreement with the above answers, these things are crap, absolute crap, even if you could get it working well it would probably break down within 2 or 3 months, I bought a tamacrap, it would only run backwards, so I get in touch with tech support, their answer to my problem had me laughing all the way back to the store as I returned it. They said, "We don't know what you have done wrong, but we have sold lots of these film scanners and they all work properly". I returned it and ended up with a Minolta dimage dual, which is a dream to use and gives incredible results. You get what you pay for.

-- Don Moor (don42@home.com), June 18, 2000.

Hi there, two weeks ago I bought the Acer Scanwite 2720S (SCSI). It has a good quality for slides (diapositives) an Black/white negatives. Max. scan : 2400 dpi. But I scan with 1235dpi and save the file as TIFF (~5MB). It costs under 400USD. Greetings, Yves

-- Yves Gilbertz (yraser@yahoo.com), June 20, 2000.