Pacific Image PowerFilm 35mm Film Scanner Converts Negative/Positive Strips into Digital. Up to 10 Film Strips/Maximum 60 Frames in One Batch, 24 MP, Mac/Pc

Before purchasing I was unsure whether this would work properly for documenting old family memories. So far I am really impressed with the scan quality and the ease of use. The app has some quirks and can crash at times, but overall it is a great value. I am using the native app.I am going to continue to use it and may add some photos to my post so everyone all can see the quality is great.There's absolutely nothing else in this price range that can produce this quality, and I definitely didn't want to start with a flatbed scanner as it is much more work and more expensive. You can't beat this for the $499 price. Also, I added a 4 year warranty by Amazon just in case any issues come up within 4 years.

I was so excited to get this and digitize negatives. If it worked it may be worth it. Don't buy this expecting it will be fast. Slow as molassas. The scratch removal is pretty good. The software keeps erroring and crashing. You may have 45 minutes into a batch scan and it chokes on the last strip. Frustrating as hell. Keeps trying to take more than one negative at a time. The quality when it does work is very average. I am very disappointed and I have spent so much time trying to make it work.

I have now processed a substantial number of photos and the quality of the digitised images is good. It is important to check the Troubleshooting guide to learn how to release the negative strip and remove it should something go wrong - and it will. I had numerous instances of "unrecognised image" to contend with and nothing would resolve this easily except perseverance. Other issues are that the software had a severe clash with the anti-virus software on install!!!!? Also the application will tend to hang if it thinks that there is phantom strip in the feeder and that can happen frequently. But when working its great and worth the hassle if you have a lot of strips to do.

Pros:* You can just put your entire roll (in strips of 6) in the scanner and walk away* Image quality is very usable (I'd still use my Minolta 5400 if I wanted to print a frame really big, but I imagine those'll be rare casesCons:* The ICE (magic touch) feature doesn't always work very well, and can produce weird artifacts.* The provided software doesn't let you save the scanner unprocessed (I'd prefer to invert using ColorPerfect myself)* Vuescan supports it, but it can only do one strip at a time, and the multi frame cropping is totally broken, so scanning Raw is not very practical (but the scanner's automatic negative inversion is fine, so it doesn't bother me very much).* It's open on top, so I think it'll gather dust easily. I've only had it for a day though, so it's just an assumption.Overall, huge workflow improvement. Won't need to take a day off to scan my backlog anymore.

The first scanner I got did not work at all, so I had my doubts about this product, especially since the first review on Amazon was so negative. I contacted the manufacturer and they replaced the scanner for me. I received the replacement a few days later and it works beautifully. The quality of the scanned image is much higher than my older Plustek, and being able to load the negatives in batches is huge.The naming software is a little rudimentary. Every time you load a new batch of film strips, it starts saving the images starting with the count of 001. I have not figured out a way to make it start with a different number, so I've resorted to renaming the images from the prior batch. I also can't figure out how to designate a permanent scan folder. Every time I start a new scan, it reverts back to the default folder. However, given the quality of the images and the time saved by letting the scanner run automatically, these are small complaints.

I have been using this for a few days now and 1) Can not make multiples exposure work. It loads the film, ejects the film and hangs the connection to the computer. Mac Catalina. The support has not responded in 5 days other than asking for version numbers and telling me engineers are reviewing. 2) Program crashes regularly and leaves file system in a corrupted state where the directory containing scans is locked from the OS and other devices can not see the directories. Bad coding! On restart there is a message that a lock file is removed but the files are not accessible on any other computer on the network. Not a permission issue. In general the device seems better than its software and the tech support response for a $800 product is terrible. Will probably return.

I bought this for its batch scanning capabilities since there's nothing on the market that claims to do what this does for the price point. Sadly the hardware and software is not fit for the purpose (as other reviewers have pointed out), on either MacOS or Windows (not even the beta version you may get from support). Feeding issues, film detection issues and ultimately a creased negative. I can't recommend this at all - I returned mine for a refund.

I have now used mine for 14 days and have edited my review, again, based on further experience. Reviews have been very mixed and I thought it’d be useful to share my experience, which, oddly, has deteriorated, not improved, with use.Would I recommend the PowerScanner for scanning your old negatives? No, sadly. Even if you have a large collection (a few thousand old images, say) you want to digitise, although I can’t see any of the other options being practical for this volume of scans either. It could be good, but there are too many major irritations and downright problems that you should be aware of before investing really quite a large amount of money in this machine. Mine is now refusing to scan multiple strips of perfectly good condition negatives, the whole purpose of this expensive machine, which is why I am sending it back. It's a great shame, as I'd have thought some modest additional development in both physical construction and software could transform the machine.GENERAL OBSERVATIONYou can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Ie. poorly exposed images can only be repaired so much in, say, Lightroom. Similarly, a photo that looked reasonably well-focused on a 6x4 print, can look somewhat fuzzy on a 27 inch screen! Worth noting before you go down this path.GOOD POINTS• This would seem (if it actually worked) to be the only sensible option to scanning large set of negatives. I can’t imagine doing a few thousand scans with other scanners.• You can (in theory, but usually not in practice) set the scan up and walk away for an hour or so.• If your negative is decent quality, you can get a reasonably good digital copy, which can be digitised to a decent level of low-noise detail. But you’ll need a developing tool like Lightroom to make the best of the scans – some of my negatives were developed with some quite weird colour balances that needed serious digital adjustment.• The scanning software is pretty simple to use (but see below re major bugs).BAD POINTS• The machine started "overlapping strips", occasionally at first, but now all the time. Ie. the last image of one strip and the first of the next are combined. This, in effect, renders the multiple strips at a time facility unusable, which is the whole point of this machine.• Film strips jam easily, particularly if not fairly flat. If the strips are noticeably curved (roughly half of mine are convex to the shiny side), it’s worth doing the strips a few at a time, rather than 6-10.• Careful preparation of the strips is important prior to setting a scan run. But unless your strips are completely flat and of equal length, this takes some practice. The “stop” mechanism, against which the strips need to pushed prior to scanning, is too low and it’s easy to insert some strips too far and others not far enough.• The software is unacceptably buggy. It regularly stalls (over 50% of the time, in my experience) - it does not then respond to the “exit” command, requiring tedious Task Manager (in Windows) action to close and restart. It can lose contact with the scanner. It can simply stop, sometimes losing a whole strip of scanned images. These are all quickly reset, but are deeply irritating. Pacific Image should fix this and update the software.• No option to select a single image of a strip (this would often be useful if the software has failed, not capturing a final image or if the first image in a strip has overlapped with the last one of the previous strip).• Image scanning can be inconsistent (if unhappy with the image, can be worth rescanning).• A decent scan really requires the full image quality (16 bit tiff) and restoration/dust removal treatments – this ends up taking 2 or more minutes per image. Fine, if an entire film works in one go; irritating, if you have to reset jammed scans, etc.• A full 16 bit scan tiff is c. 125mb – ie. a huge space requirement. I have chosen to develop with a tiff, export in Lightroom to a jpg (say 5mb, though, frankly, you could probably save to a smaller size with a limited quality impact) and then archive the tiff on a spare drive.• It’s actually quite noisy. You wouldn’t want to spend hours sitting next to it as it buzzes away. If you can’t leave it in a separate room to do its thing, I’d suggest noise-cancelling headphones to reduce the noise. Any house mates will not appreciate it in the same room as them.• Cleaning access is poor. Given how important it is to do frequent cleans, better physical access should have been designed in. A cleaning run is only a few minutes, however.• Firmware can require reinstalling, although this is quick to do.• It’s a lot of money. This would be acceptable if it worked as intended, but too many reviewers, like me, have found it just doesn't.

I was looking forward to this product as I have alot of negs to scan. Product arrived in good condition and I installed the machine on my PC. I scanned a range of colour and B&W negatives about 200. Generally the results were very good. The unit has now stopped working. I keep getting a "Unrecognisable images" error. I have emailed support and await the reply. A bit disappointed with this. I have tried all sorts of negatives, same error.

Couldn't get it to work on either a MacBook Air (2012) or a MacBook Pro (2019) as per instructions so I returned it and ordered another as I assumed it was faulty. I was unable to get the second one to work so that was returned as well. In both cases a number of errors occurred including not recognising that film had been loaded, continuously feeding film even when not loaded, not progressing past the initialising phase during scanning or not recognising any images once scanning was complete.

not worth the cost. will be scrapped as the design can never work for long

Having inherited a vast number of 35mm negatives I was curious to investigate, I was looking for a time saving solution. I have tried the usual scanners which are all invariably slow and labour intensive. The PowerFilm Scanner seemed to be a godsend when I learned about it and despite the high price decided to buy one. Sadly the performance does not match the claims made for it. I should have taken heed of the UK reviews (the gushingly effusive US ones raise questions of provenance). Essentially my experience of the scanner mirrors that of the reviewer who found that the software often crashes (I am running Windows 10) and that the scanner frequently feeds whole film strips through without scanning. The scans which did succeed produced grossly over exposed images of poor definition even at the highest scan settings. The final straw came when I conducted a firmware update and now the scanner does not even attempt to scan - just feeding the film strips straight through. Sadly I have had to return the product as it is just not fit for purpose in its current incarnation.