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Small device does big cleaning.
In the world of professional scanners, Plustek isn't exactly a household name (despite company literature claiming to be the "world's leading scanner manufacturer"). In fact it wasn't until the 72001 press release landed on my desk in March of 2006 that the company even showed up on our radar. But that press release piqued our interest with some promising specifications-7200 x 7200 dpi with iSRD dust removal technology, a USB 2.0 interface in a body that's about the size of a loaf of bread, all for just $399.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was the dustremoval technology that caught my eye. Hardware-based dust and scratch removal technology is vital for the average scanner user. We have, in the past, reviewed flatbed scanners with price tags more than ten-times that of the 7200i that lacked any dust removal technology, and their resulting scans have been fantastic looking from an image-quality standpoint, but a total nightmare from a post-processing point of view. It just doesn't seem to make sense to us to have a $10,000 scanner that doesn't at least offer the ability to auto clean-up an image.
Dust removal technology, though, is a bit controversial. In order to remove artifacts on the film, these technologies focus different wavelengths of light on the protective layer of the film, mapping out areas with scratches and then using a sort of software-based healing-brush to remove them. The manufacturers of expensive scanners missing this (user enabled or disabled) tool argue that the technique to remove scans isn't as precise...