When Nikon stopped production on their Coolscan 9000, I thought we'd never see another dedicated medium format scanner. I could have kicked myself for not buying one, but at the time, I wasn't ready to shell out $2,000. Now, several years after production ended, the same scanner, used, is selling on auction sites for well over $3,000! I understand it's a great scanner, but no way.

So I was excited to find out that Plustek came out with its own medium format scanner, the OpticFilm 120, for the same selling price as the original Coolscan 9000 when it was available retail. Initially, I held off purchasing one, wanting first to read every review I could find. There were some early production problems, during which time Plustek actually stopped production for many months. Rather than put me off, I was impressed that a company cared enough about its customers and product to do this, so I waited it out until production resumed. The Opticfilm 120 begain showing up again in late September of this year. I waited a little longer and heard good feedback from people who bought these newer releases. Then, once I heard that Vuescan was supporting this scanner, I ordered one and was not disappointed.

The scanner ships with Silverfast Ai Studio 8 and a slew of well designed, sturdy film holders.

The image above is one of my first scans, made from an Ilford Delta Pro 400, 6x6 negative. I will post more as I continue mining my archive.

Here is another one, this one in RGB mode with a slight tone, same film info, also made with the Bronica and scanned using the OpticFilm 120:

This next one is a color slide converted to a sepia tone. This was scanned with one of the first versions of Vuescan to support the OpticFilm 120. The IR dust and scratch removal set at medium had little effect. This issue may have been addressed by now, but I have not yet updated the software. Note that Vuescan is frequetly updated and tweaked. One of the great time-saving features of using Vuescan is that you do not have to preview the entire holder to scan one image - you just set the frame number in the software and then get a quick preview of just that frame. Another great feature (there are many) is that you can use one instance of Vuescan for every one of your scanners, whereas Silverfast is tied to an individual make and model. You can even save your scans as raw files along with the IR channel, so you can return to process and tweak your images later before outputting the final tiff or jpeg files.

And this next one is an Ektachrome slide scanned with the Silverfast application that ships with the scanner: