Automated 35MM Slide Scanner

I purchased 2 of these scanners. The first one did not work straight out of the box. The second one worked okay for a few trays, then it started cutting off the left side. The tappet is misaligned; it does not place the slide in the right position. The mechanical design is ridiculous. I was sent instructions for correcting this. I followed these instructions several times, to no avail. I would say DEFINITELY STAY AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT. It is all advertising and no functionality. I would never buy anything from Pacific Electronics again.

UPDATE Oct. 2012 - It's the good and the great! OK - this unit does an outstanding job of scanning 35mm slides after all. I have now scanned about 1,000 slides, and the results are stunning. My wife and I are now enjoying these old memories on a high definition TV screen. I've experienced slide feed errors of only about 1 in 1,000. Much different that my original experience. As other another reviewer noted, to make this unit work successfully you need to plan to spend many hours of trial and error effort. Furthermore, at least two additional purchases are needed - VueScan Professional software and a Paximat Model 100S slide carousel. The slide trays that came with the PowerSlide 5000 (and the free tray included with my purchase) just don't work for cardboard-mounted slides. I purchased two Paximat 100S carousels so that I could load 100 slides while 100 were being processed. I also purchased a Paximat Model 100 (no "S" prefix) which has wider slots. I did this in case I acquired some glass mounted or plastic frame mounted slides. Learning to use the VueScan software was also a challenging trial-and-error experience, but once mastered it is a powerful and flexible alternative to the included CyberView X sofware. In addition, VueScan Professional has a key added feature of creating "raw" scan files. In short, you save raw digital files that are direct digital captures of images seen by the SlideScan 5000's sensor (I also set the scan at maximum 5000 DPI). Assuming no physical scan error issues such as a slide misfeed, you can then post-process very quickly and as often as you want by having VueScan Professional rescan the raw digital file instead of rescanning the actual physical slide. This is perfect for archival purposes, which is my main objective. Handling old slides only once also has clear advantages. In other words, THIS IS A VERY POWERFUL AND FLEXIBLE FEATURE FOR POST PROCESSING such as for creating JPG, TIFF or images! I also purchased the "VueScan Bible" which has been extremely helpful. In addition, I have a 3TB USB 3.0 external hard drive connected to my PC (Windows 7 64 bit) to capture the images, as raw files in particularly are EXTREMELY large. Furthermore, I copy all scans to a second external drive for backup. I have about 5,000 slides yet to scan and the overall process has now become very straight forward and reliable. My only remaining concern is whether or not the PowerSlide 5000 will last through all of my remaining slides (and hopefully more). I'm also hoping for the same experience that other reviewers have had of ... many slide processed with no machine problems. A final note is that I have found the support by Pacific Image for the PowerSlide 5000 to be very responsive and helpful. The same if not more for VueScan Professional - I have had a number of questions and issues and Ed at VueScan responds within minutes, and in one case four times by email on the same day. I have increased my rating on the PowerSlide 5000 to a 5 star rating now that I have figured out the unit, its idiosyncrasies, and the key accessories required. --- This unit is outstanding in many aspects and disappointing in some others. All things considered, would I buy it again? The answer is a definite yes. However a note of warning: this is not a machine for the casual user. Patience and technical skill are both absolutely necessary. First the bad: the construction quality is disappointingly marginal, and slide feeder jams are a common occurrence. Historically, most consumer slides were mounted on thin cardboard and one would expect a high end machine like this to accommodate them without jams or failures. This is not the case, and apparently plastic slide mounts were assumed in the design. When converting thousands of cardboard-mounted slides, even a 5% misfeed rate (not uncommon) is very time consuming and highly frustrating. Another complaint is the lack of good documentation on the unit's operation and its bundled software. The documentation should ideally explain the effect of using a particular software option along with step-by-step instructions on loading slides and scanning slides. A good example is the option of "Quality" versus "Normal". What does that really mean??? Unfortunately, one needs to guess the impact based on the one or two word description provided, and find out through extensive trial and error what if any impact there is. Much is left up to discovery and the machine's operation is not at all intuitive. After spending a 3 day holiday weekend of trial and error and frustration , I figured out how the unit operates along with its many idiosyncrasies along with which software options NOT to use. This unit is outstanding in many aspects and disappointing in some others. This is my third prosumer slide scanner. The first two units were Nikon Coolscan units (models 4000 / 5000) with optional auto feed trays. I bought the first Nikon in 2001 and the second in 2008, around the time Nikon exited the business. The 4000 was outstanding and gave me many years of service for ad hoc conversions for children's' weddings, etc. The 5000 is still in its box for future use if the PowerSlide 5000 ever fails. Unfortunately the Nikon units only operate on a Windows 32 bit machine, which is becoming rarer. The good: my slide conversions are outstanding, even better than what my Nikon CoolScan unit provided. I am converting at the full 5000 dpi rate and saving as "TIF" for archival purposes, and then using a program to convert to duplicate JPG files for easy viewing, etc. The ugly: the "Free" slide tray provided with this package deal does not work with this unit!!! I nearly destroyed priceless slides trying to use it. Furthermore, the slide tray that comes packaged with the unit (White Paximat 50 Magazine) cannot be found anywhere for sale. Slide trays available from Amazon and others associated with this unit also do not work with it. Bottom line: a good machine that can provide great results, but requiring much invested time and frustration.

Here's my report on my use of the scanner....I did 20,000 slides! - You can't do big quantities of slides with those hand slide scanners for less than $100. If you have more than 700 slides or so buy an automatic scanner. It looks like one of those old slide projectors with carousels without the lens which projects onto a screen. Instead, that hole is covered and hides a CCD behind it onto which the internal light projects the image. I bought the Pacific Image Powerslide 5000. The SAME scanner is sold under alternate names...you can tell when you see the picture. (The 5000 stands for maximum scanning resolution of 5000dpi) Be aware this scanner costs $1000. I bought mine here at Amazon. But having a service scan all MY slides would have been much much more. Maybe that wouldn't be true for you. Do the math. I plan to sell it to my sister at 33% discount and then she to my brother to use with their slides. When we're all done we'll sell it on eBay, maybe for $300-$500. So hopefully the net cost to me will be $200 to $300. - It comes with a 50 slide tray but it doesn't work well and takes too much loading. So I then also bought TWO (one running and one to load for quicker turnaround) of the rotary trays (VERTICAL not Kodak HORIZONTAL). Also sold on Amazon. - Then you tinker with the included software and decide what resolution you want. Try several settings and compare the results. The tradeoffs are that the higher the res (up to 5000 dpi) the longer the scan takes per slide AND the larger the resulting file. I settled on 3500 dpi. Each slide took about 4 minutes, and is about 6-9mb. At 5000 dpi, the scans were 10 minutes and 80-100mb. At that setting I'd still be scanning at age 95 and require 1600 TERABYTES of storage...which at today's prices would be $160,000. Do the math. - I also used the setting which prescans the slide with infrared and then adjusts the final scan to remove dust. IT works pretty good! I did not use the auto color adjust. Instead I used Photoshop elements aftewards for those needing help. - I let the scanner run all night and all day. It bogs down my computer when it's processing the scan (about 30-45 seconds of each 4 minute scan) so you may want to do it ONLY at night if you use the computer for other things during the day. Or maybe you have a faster computer than my Portege I5 1.6ghz. - The tray sometimes jams....I had horrible problems at the beginning. I discovered two things that help: First, make sure the slides are not bent or even warped. If they are, it's sometimes because on old slides the film sticks to the cardboard mount. It shouldn't. The slides are meant to just sit loosely in the mounts but heat and age can make them stick. So instead of trying to bend the mount straight, just PULL on the edges and twist gently to make the film break loose and it will settle in and the mount will usually straighten. Second, the rotary trays have little plastic "tabs" which grip the slides when you put them in. The idea is to keep the slides from falling out IF you turn the tray upside down. That's useful if you use the old projectors, but the scanner is too delicate and the slight pressure from that tab can hold the slide too tightly and make the mechanical arm which pushes the slides into the scanner miss and jam. It's a nightmare since it happens at night, you don't realize, then have to restart computer, scanner, figure out the numbers where it stopped....etc. But the solution is just to BEND or BREAK OFF those little plastic tabs....yes all 100 of them in each tray. Of course now you won't want to turn the tray upside down! But it works great. - Each morning I'd run through the scans (I kept them in different directories to keep them sorted). I would use Windows Live Photo Gallery to flip them or invert them as needed, crop them (both because the scanner sometimes leaves black edges and the original might just need cropping). When exposure or color was bad I'd tinker with Photoshop Elements. You can do this with Photo Gallery but Elements is MUCH better and it's auto color correction is perfect 90% of the time. All this might take a minute or two per slide. Many don't need anything, but oldest ones and film rolls where I consistently underexposed needed a lot. This takes time! 20,000 x even 1 minute. Do the math. But the amazing thing is that even those old washed out totally RED slides can be restored. What fun to see them brought back to life!! Some suggest using a calibrated target slide. I bought one but didn't use it. Frankly with so many to scan I couldn't be that fussy. - The scans come out pretty good. One disappointment has been that they often seem a bit out of focus.I wasn't sure it scanning at a higher res would have made any difference. I've been too lazy to dig out an old projector and match the scan on my large screen with a projected image of the slide. I suspect the slide is still sharper., tho not always since I am not an expert photographer. BUT....with Photoshop you can sharpen them, and part of why some may seem a bit fuzzy is because I am looking at them on a 27" monitor from 20 inches! When I show them on the 46" TV or sit back they look just great. Overall, after initial frustration, and now months and months later, I am happy with the purchase and would recommend this device to anyone with a little technical savvy and lots of patience.

This scanner offers a lot of reasons to dislike it. For one thing, the price is about three times what I feel it is worth. There are no good alternatives, though. The software that comes with it, as other reviewers have noted, is terrible. The documentation is extremely limited, too. It feels like it is from the early DOS era. The plastic slide tray that comes with it only holds 50 slides, so even though the scanning is slow, you cannot load a large batch and let it process them while you are sleeping The tray is awkward to use. Slides spill out easily and it is hard to read the white on white tiny numbers. The tray does not seem like it was made to fit with the machine. It is very difficult to get it started, so I never use the first slot. The tray, which was made by Braun, says it was made in WEST Germany. Since Germany was reunited in 1990, it must have been sitting in a warehouse for decades. That would partially explain the high cost. It is noisy and slow, but what do you want for $1,000? The quality of the images is just so so. I suspect that 80 to 90% will require significant tweaking with Abobe products. Overall, I think Pacific Images is offering early 1980s technology that uses parts from other companies and sells for 2015 prices. I am not happy with this scanner, but the only alternative I could find was a Braun scanner that had similar specs for twice the price.

I received the Pacific Image PowerSlide 5000 scanner a few days ago, to replace a Canon flat-bed scanner for scanning slides. My project to scan several thousand slides had ground to a halt, because scanning four at a time had become just too tedious. Several comments: I agree with others about the supplied tray. This is for scanning slides up to 1/8" thick, which pretty much means glass mounts. When scanning cardboard mounts, I get a 5% to 10% misfeed rate. Apparently there's so much room in the slide slot that the pickup arm can miss the slide, leading to a misfeed. As others have recommended, I bought two of the 100-slide circular trays; these have performed much better, although there've still been a couple of misfeeds. I bought the Braun trays for slides up to 2 mm, but interestingly they're now shown as not available. Others commented on the need to keep the 100-slide trays full so they stayed in balance. I found an easier way to keep the trays in balance without having to load them fully. I organize and scan my slides based on the original 20- or 36-slide boxes. I simply loaded one box of 36 slides starting at slot 51. Then when I load +/- 36 slides starting at slot 1, the tray is balanced. Once I finish scanning all my 36-slide boxes, I'll load 20 slides starting at slot 51 and scan all my 20-slide boxes. One reviewer commented that the scanner felt lightweight or cheap. I did not get this same impression. It's a little tricky figuring out how to mount the straight and circular trays, and the instructions in what is mainly the O&M for the included scanning software are very vague. After a bit of trial and error, though, I got the hang of it. Same with scanning individual slides with the separate single-slide slot, which must be done with the tray in place. As commented, it is both slow and noisy, so I tend to start a tray when I'm going to be in another part of the house--or perhaps asleep! As almost everyone else did, I bought VueScan--the professional version, although I'm not sure this was necessary. This has its own learning curve, but helped by the purchase of the VueScan Bible as well. I scan to JPGs at 2500 DPI, which results in JPGs of about 1 MByte. Yes, I've read the comments recommending scanning at top resolution and saving as RAW or TIFF, but these are for the most part family snapshots and I just can't justify the storage footprint (or post-processing to reduce the size) for pictures that will likely only ever be viewed a few times. One thing I wanted to be sure to comment on--the "Magic Touch Dust & Scratch Removal". This uses an infrared exposure to infer what's part of the photo vs. what's on the slide, which I think is similar to Digital ICE that some other devices use. Its effectiveness is uneven, apparently based on the film batch or some variable I'm not aware of. It isn't just the type of film, because almost all my slides are Kodachrome, and it works on some and not others. Anyway, my comment is that when it works, it's spectacularly effective--far better than I might have expected. There's a moment at the end of the scan cycle when you see the raw image, and then the image after dust and scratch removal. It's almost uncanny to see all the dust disappear instantly, without any apparent effect on the image. When it doesn't work so well, I fall back on PhotoShop Elements; but most slides don't need this. Overall, I'm highly impressed and give this a five star rating. This is just what I needed to get me back on the project of scanning a lifetime of slides, literally going back 60 plus years; slides my parents took in post-war Europe in the 40s where my Dad was in the occupation; slides from the 50s of various homes I lived in and schools I went to; slides from college days in the 60s; and slides of my kids from the late 60s through about 2000, when I abandoned slides and started using print film (big mistake from a digital archiving standpoint).

The good: * Scan quality, efficiency, and automation are far superior to the "4 slides at a time" models * Considering the limited market (aging media), this is a well designed machine that looks and works well. * It did what I wanted and in the long run, will save me $$ on transferring a large number of slides from 35mm to digital. * "Misses" did happen, but were relatively rare (e.g. slides not slotted properly for scan by the mechanical arm, etc.) The bad: * The setup is painfully complicated and not well explained by the manuals. * The provided software is pointless. Be prepared to purchase a license for VueScan (sold by a different company) * Even after getting VueScan, getting things tweaked to where you want them and batching your slides is complicated. * They could have explained a little better which direction to insert the slides in. Something that simple shouldn't be so cryptic. WHY YOU SHOULD OR SHOULDN'T GET THIS: If you have less than 1000 slides, unless you are concerned about controlling the quality yourself and really want to spend the time doing it, do not think of buying this as a money saving proposition. You might as well have a company that specializes in slide transfers do the scanning for you. The truth is it takes a long time to learn, properly use, and then process the results of this machine's work. At the same time it is so much better than other comparably (or less) priced machines. So I am grumbling a bit, but I was satisfied with the scan results. Looking at the slide directly it is still obvious there is a noticeable loss in quality (mainly sharpness) from the original, but no scanner is perfect in that way. You also have to be vigilant of color changes that can occur between the original slide and what you see after the scan is completed. It takes a little extra work to get as close as possible. Even as a software engineer, I found this unit to be poorly documented, and a bit complicated to use. That's why I give this three stars. If you plan on scanning a huge amount of slides, and you have the technical and photo adjustment skills to guide the process, this might be a good purchase for you (compared to other options). If you just have a small (say, 1000 or less) number of slides and not much technical skill or patience to spend all the time needed to process results... maybe rather than buy a machine at all, you should consider someone to do it for you. I did use this to produce a book for my parents based on slides I scanned they had given me. They were very happy with the results. My approach was to scan 100 slides at a time, do color corrections in iPhoto, then organize them into a book through iPhoto's built-in book publishing option. It does take a lot of computer processing power to scan at full resolution, so be prepared for a little bit of computer slowdown while you're scanning (maybe a lot, if not on a fast machine). It can take a couple hours at a time to scan a tray of slides.

EDIT: I returned this. Still 2 stars. It wasn't worth my time and tech support was not able to offer any real solutions. Ultimately they (tech support) had me operating the scanner with the covers completely removed and wanted me to bend the feed arm, based on which way it slipped off the slide. I did what they asked an no matter what it could not feed slides accurately-it was not consistently falling off one side so bending it really didn't make sense. For now I will use my Epson v700 to scan slides. I can rely on every slide being scanned, but it does take a bit more effort to load the trays and change them out every 12 slides. Bottom line is that I think the Pacific Image 5000 is a nice scanner with a really aweful transport mechanism. If you have time to baby sit the machine watching for every time it misfeeds or jams then maybe it is for you. But in my world that is ludicrous. At this price point the scanner should just work. I would say 5 stars for scanning and 1 star for the automation rounding it to 2 stars. -------- ORIGINAL REVIEW: I only give this 2 stars because the actual scan of a slide is very very good. However, the transport mechanism is almost a joke. This scanner could be nice if the transport mechanism for the slides was not absolute junk. The scans made by the scanner itself are absolutely beautiful. (some of the best scans I have seen of 35mm slides. The scanner itself does a terrific job. Magic Touch is very very good. I was able to use Magic Touch to scan Kodachrome slides without the typical artifacts when doing the same with Digital Ice. But the transport mechanism is very very poor. A machine that costs this much should just work and this one does not. PROS: • Excellent scans. • Excellent resolution. • Excellent color and color correction • Magic touch is wonderful • I do not think software is nearly as bad as described by other reviews. It gets the job done and simply operates all of the scanning features. CONS: • Transport mechanism misfeeds scans 50% of the time. You simply cannot let it run on its own. A misfeed scans all white image • Had many problems with tranport partially feeding the slide in. Partial misfeed gets you a scan of a small portion of th image • Had several problems with transport jamming slide on the way exiting the scan area. • Transport mechanism cannot sense a jam or feeding error. So it continues to scan when no slide is ready for the scanner and when it jams ]the mechanism grinds the gears. • Had errors from the device that stated the single slide carrier was not closed when it was latched closed. • Tech support was friendly until she got frustrated with me • The impression I get from dealing with tech support is that feeding errors are common. Tech support was readily available. She asked me to align the transport arm which entails removing the housing from the scanner and actually bending the arm with gentle force--there is no adjustment except bending it. The tech support person seemed to get frustrated with me as I had to ask numerous questions. I honestly have never bought a piece of electronics that had to be bent manually and I was concerned doing it. After all I spent 1000 dollars on this thing. I have not returned the scanner yet, but I am so frustrated with it that I probably will. A $1000 piece of equipment should "JUST WORK." I scan photos and slides in a small shop as a living. I have been using an Epson 700 for slides for a few years and was hoping to "step up" to something a bit more automated. The epson scans 12 at a time and I was relishing the idea of 50 at a time. This scanner is not really capable of doing the job in my shop. I can't tolerate a machine that would skip so many images and then I have to hunt through the files and figure out which ones to rescan. I do not have time to babysit it waiting for it to misfeed, nor do I have time to rescan a bunch of slides due to machine error. I feel like the positive reviews are astonishing. I can only guess that there is a massive Quality Assurance problem in making these units and that I got a junk one if I am to believe the other reviewers.

The concept is great, works great for a while, but it has jamming problems if the slide frame is not plastic and also doesn't insert all the slides in completely. I tried THREE different units and the same problems happened with EVERY one. DO NOT RECOMMEND.

I bought 2 of these, the second was a replacement, both of them lasted about 1000 slides. When it worked it worked well. The second one was returned for refund when it jammed plastic mounted slides. It damaged a few of my slides before I decided enough is enough. This model has now been discontinued. I will not purchase the replacement model because of my experience with this. If anybody has any recommendations on batch slide scanners I would be interested in looking at them.

Installation is really messy. The driver on the disk is outdated and a newer one must be obtained from the manufacturer. Then one can run it with Vuescan. The magazine supplied is not only useless for slides in normal slim cardboard/Pakon mounts, but will cause your slides to jam and even get eaten by the machine. You will have to send away for the compact black Braun magazine. (Cardboard mounts will jam in that, only Pakons will work.) It works fine for thicker mounts. The manual is really misleading: why illustrate loading from the BACK of the scanner? Absolute obscurity attends the question of which way round the slides should be inserted into a magazine. The instructions in the manual, apart from the aforesaid stupid illustration from the back of the machine, appear to have been written by someone who had never looked at a real slide. Side 2 is conventionally the emulsion or back side. Sharper scans are always obtained when your slide is properly oriented in relation to the lamp, with the right or shiny side towards the lamp. This is a separate question from whether they are inserted upside down or horizontally instead of vertically. If you load as illustrated, with the right side facing forwards towards the next lower number, your scans will all be mirrored; therefore for some time I have had the impression that what is right for this machine is the OPPOSITE of what is written. It turns out that I was just misled by the manual, and your mirrored scans are right, they must simply be flipped in software. Incidentally this scanner has one advantage over most, that the scanning area is square, so that portrait v. landscape is not a problem, and other formats than 35mm may be scanned. Excellent scanner once one can get it going, fast and produces big files. I haven't tested the degraining, but the dust-and-scratches mechanism is very efficient. It will clean up dirty slides decades old.

Works as advertised. High resolution. Even lighting across each slide. Automatically scans a tray of slides. I am happy I got it.

terrible, slow and poor quality for the money. very old technology. I can scan faster by hand