I once scanned thousands of films with a Plustek OpticFilm 7400. Here are impressions, tests and some practical advice on how to do so as quickly as possible.

1 Using Linux and Automating Scanning?

No. However, running the software suite that comes with the scanner in a VirtualBox running Windows will work fine.

Still, the lot being intended for Windows and the feeding manual, nothing in this solution is meant to be automated. Dealing with thousands of films is still hours' worth of interactive work. This is all about trying to save seconds each film.

2 Bundled Software

There are two DVDs:

• The OpticFilm Series one installs the driver and a scanning program called QuickScan. It also includes some rather unneeded software, namely Presto! ImageFolio 4 which is a graphics editor and Presto! PageManager which is a file manager. Just, why would you?
• The SilverFast one installs the SilverFast scanning program.

3 Operation

I haven't seen it really explicitly mentioned but you're probably supposed to directly use the buttons on the front of the scanner. While you can use the QuickScan one after having installed the driver, you need SilverFast to use the IntelliScan one. The manual explains how to mount films into the holder. They're on about putting the non-glossy side down, but you can't always see the difference between the two sides, in which case you might as well just pick a side at random, as it doesn't appear to make a significant difference anyway.

There's a Batch Mode available in SilverFast but the only thing it does is to increment a counter in the filename. At any rate it doesn't mean that you don't still have to go through several clicks before you get to scan anything, so it's really not batch at all. QuickScan is with that respect more convenient, because not only does it increment a counter, but it also lets you directly scan by pressing the corresponding button on the front of the scanner.

Note that the scanner is a bit of a wobbly build and you probably want to slide a folded piece of paper or two underneath to level it off.

4 Resolution and Speed

The maximum optical resolution is 7200 dpi. However the time it takes to take a scan at this resolution is far too long, and you want to ask yourself if it makes any sense at all to keep so much detail to begin with.

Using QuickScan to scan at a 2400 dpi resolution seems reasonable. QuickScan discourages you from going past 2400 dpi, actually. Note that by default QuickScan performs some auto-cropping which greatly increases scanning times (35 s vs. 13 s for 600 dpi), so you might want to disable this.

QuickScan doesn't allow you to tweak JPEG compression. Since it doesn't take noticeably more time to save a scanned image in TIFF than in JPEG, why not save it all in TIFF and convert it in JPEG with GraphicsMagick afterwards? Interestingly, you'll be thrilled to know that TIFF can act as a container to hold JPEG pictures, but gm identify -verbose on a sample QuickScan TIFF reveals that there's no compression, so I assume it doesn't do that. We might as well leave the quality to 75 % when subsequently running gm convert, which is the default for both GraphicsMagick and what QuickScan would have done if we'd let it write JPEG.

5 Useful Settings

The settings shown in the screenshot below are reasonable ones. Not sure about Gamma, so let's leave it to the default value, here. Note that we can't have more than 24-bit colours with JPEG, so let's leave it at that since the idea is to ultimately use JPEG. Note how using VirtualBox gives an opportunity to directly save scanned images into a shared folder to access them seamlessly from the host.

6 References

• TIFF