Because I haven't found a manual for the QuickScan Plus software:
ECG/Low Exposure mode: What this actually means is disable auto-cropping. If you have underexposed images, or shadows around the edge of the frame the auto-cropping can often be overzealous, if you find that you scans are cropped too small then enable this setting, on the other hand, if you have eg, oddly shaped slides, like the square format ones I found, then disable this setting to get your auto-cropping back.
Auto Exposure: I generally have this enabled since I don't want to have to do any post-processing, however I found this sometimes turned bright shots of the sky yellow and I would have to re-scan with this disabled.
Remove Scratch/Dust: It's unfortunate that you cannot fine tune this feature as I did fine
in some instances that people's eyes were being removed, resulting in
unusable, freaky looking scans, and it took me too long to notice. Conversely it is sometimes not applied even when you have it enabled, it appears that if there is a lot of dust on the image the software chooses not to apply, presumably because too much of the image would be removed. Note
that you really do have to turn it off for Kodachrome unfortunately, unless
you want to merge two runs, and often it is not applied, as described above.
Memory leak: I'm pretty sure QuickScan Plus has a memory leak. I was scanning a lot of film over several days without rebooting my computer. Towards the end of a couple of days QuickScan Plus started complaining about running out of memory. Closing the program completely and reopening it didn't fix this and memory usage was still unusually high. Worst of all this lead to a nasty issue where the scans weren't all being saved, and once I realised then I had to go back over the last few rolls to check that all frames had been saved.
Annoyances:
It's a shame you are forced to scan an entire rack every time, it would be handy if you could specify the number of frames, or it even detected a missing frame and halted there. And as far as I could see cancelling a run cancels the entire thing, it doesn't give you the scans up to where you cancelled. This was an issue for me particularly for negatives which had been cut into four frames as to get the most out of each run I was having to have two frames stick out the end and the turn them around for the next scan, and then the end of the roll usually meant that I could only fit four frames in the rack due to the end of the roll obstructing some frames on the rack. Also note that you cannot have any film protruding from the front frame of the rack because it will block the scanner from reading the encoding on the rack and the crop function will fail.
Apart from all that loading negatives is a bit finickety to get them lined up with the cassette.
The noise can be pretty annoying. The first scans I did in a large room I didn't notice it so much, but doing it in my office while I was working the whine was quite piercing.
Overall I am pretty happy with the scanner, if you can find something else to do while you're scanning, like your day job, it's pretty easy to do the scanning in the background, and the results seem fine. The trouble is I don't have a lot to compare it to. I have previously scanned prints with a Fujitsu scanner which would take in a whole stack of prints and scan one by one, which was a lot more convenient. Apparently the old Nikon scanners had an attachment which would allow you to load a stack of slides, but I can't think of a way that would be possible with pre-cut negatives.
