Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 - Scanner de Slide Automático de 3600dpi e 35mm

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

(The PS3650 scanner has been discontinued, but, from the comments I've seen on the replacement PS5000, The operational comments are still pertinent).
After 3 weeks of frustration, the 1st purchase was returned to PI as faulty! The replacement worked beautifully right from the start, and is still going smoothly after nearly 3500+ scans. It is absolutely mandatory to follow the instructions TO THE LETTER (and the supplied manual is not at all clear). I would suggest that any new user contact PI - the help group is helpful and courteous - before even setting the machine up, and ask for EXPLICIT directions for setting it up AND the startup and shutdown proceduers. Probably the most important note of caution being that THE SOFTWARE MUST NOT BE OPENED UNTIL THE MACHINE IS ON & WARMNED UP, AND THE SW CLOSED BEFORE SHUTTING OFF THE SCANNER!! If this simple precaution is followed, you should have no problems.
PI should rewrite the manual to make this VERY CLEAR to all who are primarily photographers and not necessarily computer gurus.
Scan quality is good at highest resolution (ca. 2min./scan, ~3hr. for a tray of 100 slides). Get less than 1% funky/blank scans, easily re-done. Noise is annoying but tolerable. Slide mounts must be flat and in reasonably good condition; cut/round off corners of square-cornered slides to ease feeding. Circular tray must be balanced (full, or part trays balanced with equal # of slides in positions directly opposite to scanned ones).
Tom B.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Tested with a few slides and looks good so far. Have several thousand to scan so will know more later.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

This scanner is great because once you load the slides in the tray you can scan 50 (or 100 with optional Braun tray) without doing anything else. It's very user-friendly in setting up, installing and using and provides options for scanning at resolutions from 72-3600 dpi. I have 12 thousand family slides to scan and had been using an Epsom that could only scan 4 at a time. This baby is the ticket! I highly reccomend it.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I did a lot of research before purchasing this slide scanner. I have at least 3,000 35mm slides to scan and the 50 slide holder is perfect. Setup was problem free on win 7 64bit. I tried several settings before finding the sweet spot between quality and size/time. I also have some 110 slides from a Minolta 16 camera. These slides are super small but if you set the size you can batch them as well. At 3600dpi they turned out better than I expected. Most of the slides are quite old and the photoshop elements is great along with the ICE. For what this machine is doing, it's suprisingly quiet. My flat bed Epson makes easiely as much noise. I have tried scanning slides on several flatbed scanners with adapters and have never had success. This scanner rocks.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I was in the market to find a slide scanner to transfer my family's 10,000 or more 35mm slides into .jpg format. I researched for months, read reviews, talked with all sorts of people so I knew what I wanted. I decided on the PS3650 because it was close to the dpi (4000) that i wanted and the price was about 1/3rd of its rivals. From the reviews I was expecting a noisy unit that was going to jam up every 2nd slide. My experience has been the exact opposite. I am exteremly pleased with the unit, it just sits there and works away. I am 1,000 slides into my journey and it just keeps going. And even if it fails, I can afford to purchase 3 of these units before I am getting close to the price of the rival.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Based on other reviewer's comments about difficulties with software and with slide jamming, I was somewhat skeptical. I'm running a PC with Windows VISTA. I loaded the CyberView-X software (I already had the included PhotoShop Elements 8.0 installed), plugged in the scanner, my PC found the drivers and everything worked fine.

I've scanned over 1000 slides in the first week. I strongly recommend the round Paximat 100 (3.2) white tray. This tray must be fully loaded to avoid imbalance and possible jamming. I've been scanning slides that are stored in Kodak 140-slide trays, so I load the first 100 in the Paximat tray and the rest in the 50-slide straight tray included with the scanner. The scanner is noisy as others have reported, so I ordered a 33 ft (10 M) active USB cable and have the scanner in the closet in the spare bedroom that is my "office". I'm scanning at 2400 DPI and saving in JPEG (Best)which produces about 2 Meg files. It takes about 4 hours for a tray of 100 slides, so I set it and check occassionally for jams (I've only had 3) and I set one up to run overnight. Don't forget to disable the Sleep interval on your PC -- you don't want it to go to sleep in the middle of a run.

The Digital ICE does a good job eliminating scratches and dust and the ICE GEM function does a good job eliminating grain. I haven't tried the ROC function to restore Original Color. The automatic exposure and gamma seems to produce good results. I'm scanning vacation slides, so most are just to have in a usable form and view or share with family. Those few that are special in some way will probably get scanned again and fed to Photoshop for processing and saving without compression.

As I said at the beginning, I'm delighted.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

When my mother died, one of the many things she left was a shelf full of old family slides. About 5,000 of them! Conversion services were expensive[...]. The Powerslide allowed me to scan multiple slides. For the most part, I could set it up and let it run while I did other things. [...] you can not run a batch while sleeping...it is kind of noisy! And, I did have some issues with jamming. The instructions are largely unhelpful, but I managed to figure most things out by trial and error during the first few hundred scans.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I have old family slides that never get seen because they are packed away and cannot be viewed easily. Now I can scan and put into a slide show or just have available on Picasa to use or view.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Tried using device with 50-slide tray it came with. It jammed every other slide. Called Pacific Image, the manufacturer, and thery advised I buy the "Universal" 100-slide tray for another[$]. It arrived today and it doesn't work either, missing every other slide despite leveling the machine, advancing the orange tab on the slide transport arm. Nothing makes it work. I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Compared to the $80 cheap scanner I was using, it performs like a champ. It just stinks that it took me several hours to get it installed properly. Most of the scans are perfect, but some will come out a little dark.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

A great time saver, allows you to load 50 slides at a time, start it up and walk away.

Quality is fine, especially on Ektachrome slides.

Sometimes mis-functions or jams, print time at 2 minutes a slide gets tedious and it is a bit noisy.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I gave it 5 stars because I need to:- scan a lot of slides- recover/share souvenirs amongst family members- possibly make decent 4x6 prints out of the scanThis machine does that very well. That said, it is a bit funky:- makes all kinds of noise (normal but weird)- gets angry when a slide does not go back into the tray (just need to push the arm yourself to push the slide back inside the scanner, usually work. If that fails, just turn off machine, and push slide inside, and then remove using the single slide tray)- difficult to operate the single slide scan as when it heats up, it move the feeding arm, thereby dislodging the slide!- the software can not handle kodachrome dust removal very well even if ICE is a Kodak product! You must purchase VueScan (39$) and you are in businessOf course you need to play with settings quite a bit to determine what gives the best results, but go with VueScan, it is a no-brainer purchase.I bought the item at [...], please visit once in your life!

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I purchased a PowerSlide 3650 to scan a total of about 12,000 slides; mostly family photos and travel over a period of 50 years. The 50 slide magazine attracted me because I could load it and let it run. It jammed a number of times, and each time I had to shut down the scanner, go out of the program, and start over. Coming with Photoshop Elements was a plus. I wanted to like it, but have sent it back and will probably go with a flat bed scanner that will take a lot of time doing 12 slides at a time.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

I would give this a zero rating if I could. The unit jams frequently so there is no time savings in scanning slides. I was scanning older family slides in good condition and several were ruined because of the frequent jams. The unit has no simple way to remove the slides depending where the jam occurred. The concept is great, but the product fails to meet the concept....especially at the price. I went to a hand feed unit that worked like a charm

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Very good instrument, but a little noisy. The slide viewer should come on automatically when the slide in the loader is being treated. In order to process multi slides more rapidly. If you have to look at every slide before being treated then this becomme a single slide scanner.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

In the process of converting 7000 slides - some 40 years old.
Wide slide frame quality variation leads to some slide jams and usually a reboot of the system. Slide tray that comes with the scanner has very tight tolerances. Have been to told I need to get the Braun Multi-mag 100 (3.2) - has wider slots - less jamming.
Actual slide scanning is fairly fast, decent quality. Somewhat noisy though.
The current system is only entirely compatible with Mac 10.5 systems. Snow Leopard and the Adobe Photoshop not compatible - need to edit in iPhoto. Not a big deal, but would have been good to know in advance.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

The sales literature talks about all the quality that you can get with the digital ICE, and it's true, quality is great. However, its performance spec calls for 26 seconds at 1800 dpi, which is also true if you turn off the digital ICE. Leave the ICE on, and 1800 dpi seems to come in at a whopping 138 seconds, not very impressive / efficient if need performance (didn't bother testing the speed at 3600 dpi - don't need the higher resolution). I've seen the same performance degredation with other scanners, I suspect that the cause is with the drivers not operating efficiently.

The 50 slide cartridge that comes with the machine is very tight which seems to be a source of jamming. The Braun Round Tray works better.

Cleaning the glass on this appears to be do-able, although not convenient or designed in. Overall, this does not appear to be designed for maintenance. This is several steps up from the SVP editors choice toy which can't be cleaned.

Found a troubleshooting article that calls for all other USB peripherals to be shut off when using th 3650. This puts a real damper on multi-tasking.

For those reviewers who think that this is noisy, this is quiet compared to the original slide projectors.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

Works great. Only problem was my power settings on my computer. It was shutting off computer before reel completly scanned. Enjoying scanning my slides and culling the ones I don't want.

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

After having experience with the earlier PS3600 we know how to solve most of any issues so we find this a great machine.Amazing reults with the ICE cleaning, especially if you use upgraded software.. VUESCAN [@] this speeds up workflow by 100% or more and has far more options than any other scanning software.a little noisy but worth it for the fast workflow and capability of scanning 100 slides at a time.Always use the paximat 100 white reel to stop most jams.(not a single one yet!)will be back for more!...

Comments about Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Automated 35mm Slide Scanner:

This product performs wonderfully, but unfortunately the Digital-ICE feature simply does not work with Kodachrome slides. I already have an HP slide scanner, but it was so slow sitting there and scanning each slide for 4 minutes, one-at-a-time. It's great to be able to organize & clean a batch of 50 or 100 slides, and just let the scanner do its work while I sleep. With my old Ektachromes it worked "magically" with the Digital-ICE removing virtually all dust specs and scratches while leaving actual fine detail of the photo intact and crisp. But when I got to the Kodachromes, which form the bulk of my huge collection of slides, the results were blurry and details had halos. After much research, I found that the dyes in just Kodachromes interfere with the Digital-ICE technology. So while I can scan them in groups, I still must spend 4-5 minutes with each image cleaning up the specs etc., which is almost as slow as working apace my old one-by-one scanner. After initial huge disappointment, the only reason I've decided to keep the 3650 scanner is that I know I will never otherwise scan the thousands of Kodachromes I have, and I can at least scan them all with the Digital-ICE feature turned OFF, leaving all those un-brushable and un-blowable dust specs & occasional scratches, and I can always de-speck any special images later. I DO think that the product description should point out this Kodachrome incompatability, as Koachrome comprised a major portion of the color slide market prior to the mid-1990s.
I should also point out that the manual provided has not been updated to suit the current updated program, and is poorly written by one of those people who assumes you know what they mean, and the terminology, in the first place.