Pacific Image PowerFilm 35mm Film Scanner. Auto Batch scan Negative/Positive Filmstrips. Up to 10 Film Strips/Maximum 60 Frames in One Batch. 24 MP. Mac/Pc.

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.

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.

Product arrived incomplete. Signs of dust on the power supply, CD-ROM missing and the bag with the usb lead looks particularly battered. Have had to return for a refund before ordering another as I have a large amount of negs to scan and am just hoping they are still available.

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

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.

Scanning quality very poor, red lines on many of them. Kept spitting out all strips after scanning 1st so couldnt get it to batch scan. Load of rubbish for ridiculous price! Im back to scanning on a flatbed scanner for the best results.