Microtek ScanMaker Baltimore MD

Reader Score: 7.93 (out of 10)

We had planned to squirrel away the winter scanning a few hundred old slides. Since we had already discussed using your digicam to copy slides, we wanted to use a film scanner this time. Just how feasible would it be to scan a bunch of old slides with a film scanner? We hit a snag right out of the box. Our film scanner was a 35mm scanner. All of our old slides were in 35mm mounts but they weren't all 35mm frame size. Some of them were almost as large as the mount. And some were smaller squarish sizes. It's amazing what mankind has managed throughout history to fit in a 35mm mount. So we resorted to a flatbed. Not just any flatbed, though. We've scanned transparencies on a flatbed before. We got great results from an expensive Agfa Dual years ago and miserable results from an inexpensive Umax with a transparency adapter. This time we went for a pretty interesting product from Microtek (http://www.microtekusa.com), the ScanMaker i900. It featured the same dual bed design of the old Agfa and, at $599.99 list (minus a $50 rebate coupon at http://www.microtekusa.com/images/rebatei900.pdf), was closer in price to the Umax. Most importantly, it really didn't care how big a transparency we wanted to scan. ...