Olympus ES-10 SCSI Film Scanner

Rating:
Summary: Not supported by Windows XP
Review: I bought an ES-10 a couple of years ago. It's good at the job, but, when I upgraded to XP it would not work. Olympus say it does not support NT or XP for the ES-10 and has no plans to. I now have to run a dual boot system (XP and ME) just so that I can use this one piece of hardware.

Now that XP has gone to the home market to replace 95, 98, SE and ME etc, Olympus ought to write a driver and not leave it's customer's in the lurch.

Rating:
Summary: Get Those Slides Out of the Shoebox and into the Digital Age
Review: I had been looking for a way to take the boxes of slides I shot in my twenties and get them into digital form where I was more likely to actually look at them. And of course I also wanted to share them with the few people on earth who are actually interested in seeing my old slides.

When I looked at dedicated slide scanners like those from Nikon, it quickly became clear that these were professional devices that produced huge images for quality reproduction. They were also on the wrong side of $1000. General purpose flatbed scanners, on the other hand, weren't good enough to create a decent screen or printing image from such a tiny source.

The Olympus ES-10, at $400, is just about right. Not only does it produce good-looking images from slides, it can also accept negative strips like the kind you get back from the processor. From these it can make full-screen positives or larger images for printing with a good-quality inkjet.

The scanner comes in two variation, parallel and SCSI. I chose the SCSI because I figured it was faster and because I already have about three devices trying to share a single parallel port. You need your own SCSI adapter, as none is supplied. Also, the SCSI cable that comes with the scanner is suitable only for a Macintosh. If you are using it with a Windows PC, as I am, you will need to get a cable to match your SCSI card.

The software supplied with the scanner can be run stand-alone, to produce .bmp files (the only kind natively supported) or as a TWAIN device so that you can scan your slides directly into any number of image editors like the Adobe Photo Deluxe 3.0 that comes bundled. The TWAIN solution works out to be more convenient, since you don't end up with .bmp files that you are not likely to use again. Using TWAIN, Photo Deluxe or your own image editor can likely output to .jpg, .gif .tif and many other formats.

The scanner is very easy to set up and use. Easier than a flatbed in many ways. The only additonal consideration is focus, since there is no rigid bed to hold the original in a flat plane.

The TWAIN software lets you make basic resolution, cropping, exposure and color balance adjustments to the preview image. Then you press the scan button and you're done.

All in all, I'm very pleased. The images are clear, and it's good to see them again after all these years.