For example when you're doing a tray pre-scan, it will not show you the image right away. At every corner Silverfast finds a way to infuriate you.Alright then, if your programmers are not smart enough to process images at comparable speeds to other image-editing apps, can you at least do this in the background and let me scan? Noo-o-o, it will sit there for minutes, in silence, not scanning, in "processing" state, because nobody at LaserSoft ever heard of multi-processing.I have no idea what it's doing, because I turn all "auto" settings off, including USM. It takes a very very long time to "process" an image, whatever that means, after scanning.Then it forces you to pre-scan each image again (switching to 300dpi and 24-bit to make it really count), so you're basically spending 5-10 minutes helping it find the negatives in its own holder. Silverfast wants you to click "Overview" button which will produce a postcard-sized preview of the tray, where you have to adjust the frames to left/right but you can't shrink them. You want to pre-scan the tray, set boundaries of your frames and hit "Batch scan".In addition to bugs, it's just poorly designed for film scanners, forcing users to spoon-feed it the same information many times, with lengthy prescans in between. It manages to inject a slight color cast to B/W scans even though Negafix profile is set to Ilford HP5+.It crashes (the window just disappears) every hour or so.IT8 calibration cannot recognize its own calibration target (made by LaserSoft and included with the scanner).Basically every time you reload the film, you have to re-configure everything from scratch as if you just freshly installed it. I never asked for a 300dpi scan, yet that setting keeps going back to 300dpi. Not once, never, I asked for a 24-bit scan, yet that stupid switch keeps getting reset to 24-bit. It keeps resetting your settings to its own defaults.It thinks that 6x7 tray is 6x4.5 so every time you reload a new strip, it resets to the wrong type forcing you to double-prescan. My list of Silverfast bugs is long, and I have been only been using it for two days! My "favorites": But it is very hard, and I mean it, very very hard to use because it is made by imbeciles with zero attention to detail and no empathy for a user. Silverfast is easy to use, by that I mean it is easy to understand, it isn't complicated. Who knows, they may make more money this way! Plustek should consider selling them separately for DSLR scanning people. Heavy, solid and they hold the negatives as flat as anything else I've ever seen. Takes 10-15 minutes and quite infuriating. I have not found a reliable and repeatable way to get out of this, I just keep turning it on/off and re-inserting the tray until it "kicks-in".
Then it stops, you press OK and get the same message. You pull it out, you insert it back in, it goes in/out with the usual drama for 20 seconds. Silverfast and Plustek's own calibration utility will ask you to "insert the tray and press OK" (even though the tray is in the scanner).
Maybe I am pampered, but my Epson V600 and DLSR scanning methods have been a lot quieter. There are only two things I want to complain about: At this point, I have gone through all available documentation cover to cover, and explored every single feature of Silverfast, so whatever I am posting here won't be too wrongĪs I said in another thread, the hardware is OK. I have been playing with the new toy for two days non-stop.