LaserSoft SilverFast Ai

Review Date
January 29, 2010

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Value Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
1 to 3 months

Visitors rate this review
5.00 of 5, 1 votes

Reviewed by
1jayfrogel , Expert

Price Paid
$509.00 at LaserSoft

Photography Experience
21+ years , Outdoor

Summary
I have a Nikon CoolscanLS5000 with the SF-210 auto slide feeder hooked up to a dedicated PowerMac G5 running Leopard (10.5.x). My project is to scan about 25,000 transparencies. A year ago I got through about 20,000 with the Nikon supplied software. It was a painful process. Crashes, jams, etc etc. If I could get through about 100 or 150 slides w/o a mishap I was lucky. The stack loader holds about 50 sowith 4 minutes a scan, every few hours or so I would "top it off". It took about 2 years to get through 20,000 then I had a one year hiatus.

In November I wanted to finish the project off. When I started the G5 had OS 10.3 or 10.4 on it. Now with OS 10.5 the Nikon s/w was kaput. No technical support at Nikon, nada. So I plunked down the money for silverfast Ai Studio. I've had experience with the Epson V750 version for larger negatives and transparencies. Downloaded product. Skimmed the manual which is pretty convoluted to be kind. Ian Lyons on the web has good advice. In any case I needed to find a tweaking set up that could be untouched for the 5000 slides left. Fortunately, nearly all are well exposed, etc. I had already tossed about 75% of my slides when they were first processed. I used an artist's camel hair or sable hair brush to give the slides a quick clean - some are 45 years old. Tried the iSRD dust removal technique in SF. Worked like a charm. Careful comparison of 2005 blow up of before and afer did not reveal ANY loss in sharpness, color, etc. I am scanning at 4000 dpi yielding a 115Mb file. I use the multiexposure technique and settled on about 60% color tint removal and a small boost to the darkest parts of the slides. That's it. BUT - after a shortwhile the program began to crash. After a week or so of back and forth with the very helpful people in Germany, theysent me a somewhat fixed up version of the program and said I should delete every last trace of the Nikon scanning software.

That was a couple of weeks ago. SInce then I have scanned nearly 2000 slides at 3 minutes a slide, not 4 as with the Nikon scanner. No crashes, no glitches, no problemas. nada. Except for a few times when the slide feeder hung because of problems with the slide mount. AMAZING. A million times better than the Nikon s/w ever was. But you might ask, how about the results? LOVELY, better than Nikon as well. Admittedly with use of constant set of parameters some slides could use some tweaking. But for overall archiving and quick prints they were great. Images I will use for exhibts I'll probably rescan on an as needed basis with individual twekas. For now it seems that simple adjustments with LR 2.6, Photoshop, and/or VIveza do the job very nicely, again only as needed. I haven't tried the HDR version yet but may do this in the near future.

WHo should buy this?? Anyone who has a signifcant amount of scanning to do, esp. if you own a Nikon scanner like I do. I'd guess that other slide scanners will work equally well.

Strengths
Fast, trouble free, great technical customer support.

Weaknesses
Price is a bit steep but since they are tuned to each scanner I can understant. You do need to watch for how you set up the various color spaces. DO NOT us the NikonLS5000 profile. I just stuck with Adobe RGB. ProPhoto even seemed to ahve some problems that I need to sort out with the silverfast people.

Similar Products Used
Nikon scan; SF for Epson flat bed.

Customer Service
Great.

Review Date
June 23, 2005

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Value Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
3 Months to 1 year

Visitors rate this review
4.50 of 5, 2 votes

Reviewed by
Bob_Budding , Intermediate

Price Paid
$0.00

Photography Experience
21+ years , People

Summary
This is fantastic software. Nice workflow manager (scan pilot) guides you through the many choices. You can set most adjuustments to auto, though, and tweak the results from there.

I was able to get very nice scans the first time I sat down to use this software.

Strengths
* profiles for many negative films
* IT8 calibration
* prescan concept allows adjustments prior to full resolution scan
* Nice automated tools

Weaknesses
* Price
* Confusing array of product offerings
* software is specific to scanner model

Similar Products Used
Vuescan
Epson TWAIN

Customer Service
Not needed

Review Date
June 22, 2005

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Value Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
1 to 3 months

Visitors rate this review
5.00 of 5, 1 votes

Reviewed by
jimbopdx , Expert

Price Paid
$69.00 at Direct

Photography Experience
21+ years , Other

Summary
This product came bundled with my Polaroid SprintScan 120, and I recently upgraded to the version 6 product. It stands way above the Polaroid software, and can produce very fine results from this scanner. I'm doing both 120 format (6X9) and 35mm, almost exclusively from negatives (Portra 160NC mostly), and have gotten beautiful scans.

The color, gamma, and curve adjustments are clear and intuitive and provide great control over the finished scan. I'm also trying VueScan, and between the two, SilverFast has a MUCH better user interface for getting better color, contrast, and density control in the finished image.

I've had less good luck when using the SE version supplied with my Epson 3200. On that machine, I pretty much have gone back to using the Epson software.

Strengths
Excellent user interface. Good color and contrast control. Fairly broad set of pre-defined color profiles for negative films. User interface adapts to the type of scanner and the time of film holder in use, to make control of the scanning operation easy and intuitive.

Weaknesses
Not-so-great support for batch and multiple repetitive scan work-flow. Multi-pass scanning doesn't produce the smooth, clean scans that VueScan is able to achieve (but scans are still very good). You have to buy a separate product for each scanner you have... can get expensive, especially if it wasn't bundled with your scanner.

Similar Products Used
PolaColor Insight (several versions), Epson scanning software, H-P Scanning software, VueScan.

Review Date
June 17, 2005

Overall Rating
 1 of 5

Value Rating
 1 of 5

Used product for
1 to 3 months

Visitors rate this review
1.00 of 5, 1 votes

Reviewed by
simo-images , Professional

Price Paid
$199.00 at on-line

Photography Experience
11-20 years

Summary
I have the latest version - 6.4.1r9a - and still cant get it to scan properly with my minolta 5400 more than two months after purchase.

The software puts tram-lines onto the finished scan, appearing like scratch marks which arent on the original ! The bundled minolta software does not do this. Without massive post-processing the scans from silverfast are unuseable, not an acceptable result for an expensive product nor one aimed to professional users.

As might be guessed, I cannot recomend Lasersoft Imaging as a company, at present I would not recommend Silverfast Ai program for the Minolta 5400 and forget any thoughts of customer support from them.

Strengths
Downloads easily ( ! )

Weaknesses
Doing what it claims to be able to do - it doesnt.

Similar Products Used
Minolta bundled software
Vuescan

Customer Service
Customer support is absolutely neglible. Sending email from their website form just yields an auto response email from them. They do not reply to queries, problems or questions. Lasersoft appears happy to take the money but not support the customer. Only after informing them of my web page diary ( www.simo-images.net/silverfast.html { please delete if link not allowed } ) about this software did I receive a reply, claiming that my emails had got filtered into the trash - for a software company to claim that emails from their website form get automaticaly put into a trash folder is unbelieveable - perhaps they cant program properly ??

Review Date
March 29, 2003

Overall Rating
 2 of 5

Value Rating
 1 of 5

Used product for
3 Months to 1 year

Visitors rate this review
1.83 of 5, 6 votes

Reviewed by
spokenwar , Professional

Price Paid
$145.00 at ?

Photography Experience
11-20 years , Fine Art

Summary
First of all - I needed scan software that would do batch jobs hands off with this PIE 1800AFL. This softwares ability to do any type of batch job sucks unless you have nice clean clear even negatives.

I do not shoot nice clean clear even negatives. So - I hate this software. I hate it. The only thing I like on it is the ability to use the compensator to nudge the strip back and forth.

You can get some very nice scans off of it.

Strengths
Color slides - and if you are a genius you will get a lot more out of it than i did.

Weaknesses
Their customer support, for one. You cannot keep the d*** thing open after a scan. Each time you run a scan the software closes. Now, it has a checkbox to keep the software open, BUT, you guessed it, it don't. They have this navigator type thing that puts the steps in a strip that looks like an arrow. That has a toggle to close it, but it doesn't.

this software has lots of little functional aggravations.

Customer Service
Sucks.