Pros & Cons
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- Optical resolution rated at 7,200 pixels per inch
- Automated loading of four 35mm slides or a six-image 35mm film strip
- Hardware-based dust and scratch removal
- Bundled with powerful SilverFast Ai Studio 9 software
- Includes color calibration target slides
- Special tools for Kodachrome film
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- Limited to 35mm media
- Pricey
Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai Specs
| Film Scanning | |
| Maximum Optical Resolution | 7200 pixels |
| Maximum Scan Area | 36mm by 24mm |
| Mechanical Resolution | 7200 |
The Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai ($799) is a substantial upgrade from the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE film scanner that we reviewed back in 2014. Like the OpticFilm 8200i SE, the OpticFilm 135i Ai can scan your images at an impressive resolution of 7,200 pixels per inch (ppi) and uses an infrared channel to identify dust or scratches that can be automatically removed as part of the scanning process. And both products can capture multiple exposures to increase the scanner's dynamic range.
So what's different? For starters, the OpticFilm 135i Ai can now scan four 35mm slides or a six-image 35mm film strip at a time, as opposed to a single slide or film frame. Plustek also added a motor to the unit that pulls the film holder back and forth into position for automated scanning of multiple frames. Plus, the OpticFilm 135i Ai has a new five-element aspheric lens that reduces refraction and increases the effectiveness of the hardware-based dust and scratch removal process. You'll also get SilverFast Ai Studio 9, the flagship version of one of the top scanner utility applications.
On the downside, the OpticFilm 135i Ai is limited to 35mm slides or short 35mm film strips, either negative or positive. If you need to scan any other film size, such as 120, APS, or 4-by-5-inch, you’ll need to look elsewhere. And while the SilverFast Ai Studio 9 software is a welcome addition that adds significant value to the bundle, there’s a steep learning curve that you’ll need to overcome to gain the promised (and largely achievable) excellent results.
Design: Optimized for 35mm, All the Way
Over the years, Plustek has refined its 35mm scanners to a remarkable degree. They have essentially one purpose: to draw out the best possible digital representation of an analog piece of film. The key improvement of the OpticFilm 135i Ai over the OpticFilm 8200i SE is its ability to load four individual 35mm slides or a six-image 35mm film strip at one time. This doesn’t speed up the actual scan time, but it does eliminate the tedious and time-consuming process of loading and unloading each slide or image.
(Credit: David English)The OpticFilm 135i Ai ships with two different holders: one for 35mm slides, and one for a 35mm film strip. Both are well-constructed and very sturdy, made of heavy-duty plastic with metal reinforcements to hold and secure the slides or film strip in place. There’s also an optional 35mm panoramic holder ($39.95) that’s similar to the film strip holder, but without the frame lines. It can accommodate panoramic frames up to 226mm in width, as well as half-frames.
At 4.1 by 6.9 by 10.2 inches (HWD), this scanner is small enough to place on a desktop, though you’ll need to allow another 13 inches in front of the unit to accommodate the holders before you insert them. Once you insert it partway, the holder will be automatically pulled into position for scanning your first frame. The unit’s slight 3.5-pound weight also makes it easy to move to another location, or just out of the way when it’s not actively scanning.
(Credit: David English)The scanner has five buttons along the top front: eject, positive, negative, custom, and a power control. If you do your scanning strictly through the software, you’ll only need to use the eject and power buttons. You'll also find a master on/off switch in the back of the unit, along with two ports: one for connecting the provided AC-power adapter, and one for connecting to a computer via USB 2.0. The scanner also comes with a USB-C adapter, if you prefer that setup.
(Credit: David English)Software: Scanning With QuickScan Plus
The OpticFilm 135i Ai ships with two printer utilities: one quick and simple, the other complex. The easy one, QuickScan Plus, is somewhat limited, but it is still quite useful. Because it offers fewer features through a simplified interface, you might consider starting with it, just to get your feet wet with the scanner and its multi-image loading process. It’s also a little faster, if all you need is a no-frills result. You can use its built-in photo editor to make quick color-balance, image-rotation, or cropping adjustments before saving the scans to your preferred file format. You’ll get access to the maximum 7,200ppi resolution with hardware-supported dust and scratch removal, but you won’t have some of the advanced features of the SilverFast Ai Studio 9 app, such as a fully calibrated color space.
(Credit: Plustek)QuickScan Plus gives you the option of selecting either positive or negative film, the optical resolution (600ppi to 7,200ppi), color or grayscale, the input bitrate (24-bit or 48-bit), and the save-to file format (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or Windows bitmap). Note, though, that if you select a 48-bit scan, TIFF will be the only file format that’s available. There’s no option to scan just one image from the four slides or the six-image film strip, so if you place only one slide into the slide holder, you’ll still have to complete a group of four scans. (The other three will be all-black.) There’s also no provision for saving a group of settings as a preset, though the app does remember the settings from the last time you used it.
From the Preferences menu, you can access the auto exposure feature, the scratch/dust removal feature (with a low, medium, or high intensity), and file export to a third-party image editing program (such as Photoshop or GIMP). All of these are turned off by default.
After the scanning is complete, you’ll see thumbnail views of each of the scanned images. You can then choose the Edit icon to perform simple image manipulations, such as color balance, auto exposure, rotation, cropping, sharpening, and vignetting. Under the Advanced menu, you’ll find some additional editing tools. There, you can manually adjust the contrast, brightness, or saturation levels. A handy dual view lets you see before-and-after views of your corrections. The Auto Optimization feature works reasonably well, though it did have a hard time dealing with some color-balance and color-shift issues with a few of the Kodachrome slides that I scanned.
After you export your scans from within QuickScan Plus, they are no longer available in their native format. If you want to make any changes, you’ll have to load the exported files into another application or rescan the original 35mm media.
Scanning With SilverFast Ai Studio 9
The SilverFast Ai Studio 9 app, meanwhile, is meatier but a lot more complex and much less intuitive. I had good results with it right from the start, though the results steadily improved as I tried out new features and began to understand the logic behind some of its components.
SilverFast organizes its advanced features as layers that you can add or subtract. If you need a simple, quick scan, you can perform one. Then, you can add a standard level of auto adjustments, colorcast removal, dust and scratch removal (with or without the IR channel), and multi-exposure processing. Each layer adds more time to the scans, but can also dramatically improve the results.
(Credit: Plustek)Your first step would be to calibrate the OpticFilm 135i Ai scanner for use with the SilverFast software. This bundle includes three IT8 target calibration slides; you place these into the holder, then select Advanced 3-Slide Calibration from the Tools menu. The built-in calibration routine will lead you through a step-by-step process that includes previewing images, frame-finding, and profile creation. Going forward, SilverFast will default to the resulting color profile.
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Before you scan, you’ll need to set up the basic parameters for the scan: Positive, Kodachrome, or Negative. The Kodachrome setting can help counteract that film’s light-blue cast that was meant to balance out the yellow cast of a projector’s yellowish light. And there’s a wide selection of color-depth settings. The best ones use a 48-bit color depth for the most accurate input, and then save the processed result to a 24-bit file. Output files include TIFF, PSD, JPEG, JP2, and PDF. You’ll also need to select a path for your saved scans. (By default, they showed up in my Windows /pictures folder.)
To aid in the process, you should first pre-scan the slides or film strip. The first time I scanned the slides, the outlined active area didn’t quite match the thumbnail underneath. Checking the available menu selections, I located a Find Frames option that matched up everything just as expected. After saving the workspace as my default Job, I found that it always seemed to optimally match up the frames.
Similarly, if you find that the dust and scratch removal, color-cast removal, gamma correction, or many other automated variables are either too strong or too weak for a particular set of slides or film strips, you can adjust those and save the settings as a Job for that particular kind of situation. To help you with those particulars, you can analyze each pre-scan image with a set of professional-quality tools, including a gradation curve, an input histogram, an output histogram, and a densitometer.
Before you start a full scan, you’ll also need to choose one of the size presets, ranging from Web 72ppi to Typesetter 600ppi. You might wonder, as I did, how they relate to the claimed 7,200ppi resolution. The answer is the horizontal slider located just below the preset selector. Move it all the way to the right, and the Typesetter 600ppi preset will now have a 7,200ppi resolution, even though it’s still labeled as the Typesetter 600ppi preset. Not exactly intuitive, but once learned, it’s easily remembered.
Figuring out what to do next isn't entirely intuitive, either. There’s no Full Scan button or similar menu item. The answer is hidden behind the small JobManager icon. The logic would seem to be that that’s where Jobs are managed and stored, so that’s where you should initiate a full scan using that Job’s selected parameters. For example, you might set up different Jobs for slides and film strips, as well as variations that include or exclude the rather time-consuming multi-exposure option.
Once a full scan is complete, there’s nothing else to do. The scans will be saved to the folder location and in the file format that you chose in the settings for the selected Job. If you want to make any further adjustments to the scanned images, you can use your photo editor of choice.
Testing the Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai’s Speed: Mix and Match
Plustek rates the scan speed of the OpticFilm 135i Ai at approximately 52 seconds for the maximum scanning area at 600ppi, 360 seconds for the maximum scanning area at 3,600ppi, and 25 minutes for the maximum scanning area at 7,200ppi, all with IR enabled. As there’s no way to isolate a single image for a faster scan, this speed rating would apply to a holder with as many as four 35mm slides or one 35mm film strip with as many as six images. To see if the OpticFilm 135i Ai could match or even surpass its manufacturer’s ratings, I used QuickScan Plus to initiate the scans over a USB connection to our Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Pro.
(Credit: David English)The OpticFilm 135i Ai did a little better than its official speed ratings. First, I loaded four slides into the slide holder. Then I switched on the IR channel by selecting the Remove Scratch/Dust option (with its lowest setting) from the Preferences menu. It scanned the four-slide holder in 51.9 seconds at 600ppi, 304.7 seconds at 3,600ppi, and 19 minutes and 11 seconds at 7,200ppi. If you switch off the IR channel, those scan times are reduced substantially to 28.1 seconds at 600ppi, 147.9 seconds at 3,600ppi, and 9 minutes and 38.2 seconds at 7,200ppi. Again, these were the scan times for four slides.
When using SilverFast Ai Studio 9, I saw a wide range of scan times depending on how I configured the scan engine. There’s also the time involved for the pre-scan, which has its benefits and is likely to be a part of your working routine. A typical pre-scan took 61 seconds, and that didn’t vary much across the full range of settings that I tried. The final scans varied from 94 seconds for a relatively simple 300ppi configuration to 15 minutes and 8 seconds for a fully loaded 7,200ppi configuration that included both IR-based dust and scratch removal and multi-exposure optimization.
For comparison, the previous Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE was rated for 36 seconds at 3,600ppi and 113 seconds at 7,200ppi, both with multi-exposure on. There’s no practical way to directly compare the speeds between these two scanners, in part because you would need to factor in the time needed to reload a single slide multiple times to somehow match up the scan times. Just being able to batch-load four slides or six film-strip images at a time significantly speeds up the overall process.
You may want to use the multi-exposure feature somewhat sparingly, though, as it can almost double your scanning time. For example, that 15-minute-and-8-second 7,200ppi scan with SilverFast Ai Studio 9 was reduced to 8 minutes and 51 seconds simply by switching off that one feature. Multi-exposure works by combining an under-exposed scan of your image with a normally exposed one. It’s especially useful for Kodachrome, because that’s an extremely dense film type. You might experiment with it to see if the added times are worth the benefit in dynamic range. Similarly, the SilverFast documentation recommends that you not use the IR-based dust and scratch removal when scanning Kodachrome images. The silver halide in its film material can reflect the scanner’s infrared light and cause artifacts in the scanned result.
Image Quality: Impressive, Though Not Perfect
During this review, I used the Plustek OpticFilm 135i Ai system to digitally scan 94 of my 35mm slides in both Kodachrome and Ektachrome formats, as well as 21 of my 35mm film strips in both Kodak Gold Plus 100 color positive and Ilford HP5 black-and-white negative formats. These were typical family-oriented slides and film strips, shot from 1949 through 1996. Unless you have a projector, valued pictures like these often end up forgotten in a cardboard box hidden away in a closet.
(Credit: David English)So, how good were the results? Overall, excellent. The Kodachrome slides, in particular, were surprisingly sharp and detailed, with richly saturated, well-defined colors. The Ektachrome slides and Kodak Gold positive film strips were close behind in quality. The Ilford low-light black-and-white negative film strips weren't as impressive, but still very good.
On the downside, both QuickScan Plus and SilverFast Ai Studio 9 did a less-than-stellar job of automatically correcting the color balance. There’s only so much a one-size-fits-all process can do, and neither app seems capable of performing a truly deep analysis of the individual images. And even with this scanner’s IR-based dust and scratch removal process, I found that some of these imperfections stubbornly remained. To its credit, the default removal settings didn’t affect the sharpness, detail, or color gradients within the image. These automated processes will take you most of the way there, but you’ll still need the manual tools in your favorite photo editor to achieve a more nuanced color balance and a blemish-free removal of dust and scratches.