*	Affordable "personal" film scanner
	*	2400x1600 maximum resolution (3.84 megapixels)
	*	SCSI or parallel port versions available
	*	Slides or negatives
	*	APS film transport available as option

Overview
Olympus has both a long history in film-based photography and more recently, a very well-deserved reputation in digital photographic circles, based on the performance of their excellent line of point & shoot digital cameras. With the ES-10 film scanner, they bridge the two worlds, offering an attractive way for film-based photographers to join the digital revolution.
Scanners vs. Digital Cameras
This is the first review of a digital film scanner to appear on The Imaging Resource (although a number of others are scheduled for the near future). In light of this, it seems appropriate to spend just a little while talking about the pros and cons of the combination of a digital film scanner and film camera relative to those of purely digital cameras.
Image Quality: Advantage Scanner
As good as digital cameras are becoming, they are still a ways from catching up with film: As you'll see from our test scans, the under-$500 ES-10 figuratively blows the doors off even the best of the current generation of digital point & shoot cameras, in terms of color quality and (particularly) image resolution.
Exposure Flexibility: Advantage Scanner
With a film scanner, you're not restricted to whatever ISO speed your digital camera happens to have: With current film emulsions ranging in speed from ISO 25 to ISO 3200, there's no comparison in this category - film wins hands-down.
Versatility - have it both ways: Advantage Scanner
There's a lot to be said for always having film to go back to for large or high-quantity reprints. (It's hard to beat good old silver-halide paper for low cost when you have a lot of prints to crank out.)
Leverage your existing equipment: Advantage Scanner
Those of us with substantial investments in camera bodies, lenses, and accessories for our 35mm systems are reluctant to give up all that "kit" just to go digital. A scanner lets us take advantage of all that equipment, not to mention the opportunity to revisit previously-taken shots and enjoy them in the digital darkroom.
Immediate Feedback: Advantage Digital Camera
Of course, not everything favors the film/scanner combination: There's no substitute for the ability of an LCD-equipped digital camera to give you instant feedback on what you've just photographed. The ability to immediately review and re-shoot if necessary is invaluable, not to mention the ability to immediately discard your mistakes!
Per-Shot Cost: Advantage Digital Camera(!)
When it comes to figuring your cost per shot, there's absolutely no contest: Other than amortizing the cost of the equipment, the cost of each additional shot with a digital camera is effectively zero. (Of course, this changes as soon as you print the images out.) We've made the observation before that an effective film cost of zero can have a very salutary effect on your photography. Nobody need ever see your mistakes, and they won't cost you a penny: Experiment and go wild!
The Basics
The ES-10 is a compactly-packaged desktop scanner. At 5.1 x 3.9 x 9.3 inches (13 x 10 x 23.6 cm) and approximately 3 pounds ( 1.3 kg), it should fit easily on even crowded desktops. Available with either a SCSI or parallel-port interface, the unit can be configured to work with either Mac or Windows-based systems. (For this review, we tested the SCSI-based scanner, attached to a Macintosh.) The maximum resolution of the ES-10 is specified at 1770 dpi, for an image size of 2400x1600 on 35mm film, or 1910x1090 on APS format. The unit ships equipped for 35mm scanning, but an optional adapter (Model A-10, for $199) can be purchased to scan film directly from APS cartridges.
Olympus markets the ES-10 as a "3.8 Megapixel" scanner, perhaps hoping to point out to people that this is much higher resolution than common digital cameras. In fact though, the 3.8 megapixel rating really understates the difference between the ES-10 and typical digital cameras: Digital cameras are generally rated based on the total number of pixels in their sensors, but the actual resolution is reduced by the "striping" of the sensor array to derive the red, green, and blue color information. Film scanners generally move a sensor array across the film plane, effectively putting red, green, and blue sensors behind every pixel of the scanned image. Thus, you really need to almost triple the pixels of a film scanner to arrive at the equivalent rating for a digital camera. In the case of the ES-10, this is almost true: The ES-10 actually uses two sensors -- one striped with red and blue color filters, the other being exclusively devoted to the green channel. The result is that you effectively have about 2x as many pixels as in an equivalently-rated digital camera. (If the translation hold as stated, this would equate to a "7.6 megapixel" digital camera!) As you'll see from our test images, the resolution of the ES-10 far eclipses any of the current generation of digital point & shoot cameras.
Another parameter by which scanners are measured is their "bit depth," a measure of both the accuracy and total density range the scanner can recognize. (8 bits is good, and common, 10 bit is better, high-end units digitize to 12 bits per R,G,B channel.) The ES-10 digitizes to 8 bits per channel, but averages multiple samples per pixel to achieve noise performance claimed to be equivalent to that of a 10-bit/channel scanner.
Film Handling
The ES-10 comes with two film holders, one for mounted 35mm slides, the other for loose strips of 35mm film, either positive or negative. The holders are made of tough plastic, with a heavy hinge that also acts as a handle for manipulating the loaded holders. The slide holder carries a single slide in a 2x2 inch mount, more or less rigidly oriented. (In other words, once the slide is inserted into the holder, there is little play from side to side or rotationally.) On the one hand, this is very good, as you don't want to spend a lot of time fussing with the slide holder to get the film aligned properly. On the other hand, slides are sometimes rotated slightly in their mounts, and you'd like to be able to compensate for this during scanning. We could manage a degree or two of rotation in the ES-10's holder, but not much more than that. The good news is that you'll never be off by more than that amount when you scan perfectly oriented slides. The bad news is you won't be able to compensate for more than this amount of rotation on poorly-mounted ones. (On balance, we favor the tight alignment of the ES-10 over a looser, less certain arrangement: We'll take our chances with the occasional skewed slide mount.)
We found the ES-10's negative holder quite functional, but a little awkward to use, particularly with curled negatives. The film is held in alignment by a combination of ridges and notches on the mating halves of the film holder, which hinges open like a clam shell. The male projections of the alignment guides alternate top and bottom with the female notches, with the opposite half of the clamshell assembly carrying a mirror-image pattern that mates when the holder is closed on the film. The assembly is quite precise, and holds the film in good alignment, provided that the film is both flat and at least two or three frames long. We don't view the length limitation as significant, since few people will be concerned with single frames of negative film, and those who are can pre-mount the frames in reusable slide mounts to use with the slide holder. Curled film presented much more of a problem: We found it fairly tricky to get film loaded and aligned, and the clamshell shut properly if the film was curled. While it perhaps would have made for a more delicate and easily broken film holder, we would have liked to have seen notches or other restraints into which the film strip could be inserted to hold it flat prior to closing the shell.
Despite our complaints about the difficulty of loading curled film though, we found that the negative holder did an excellent job of holding the film flat once it was properly inserted. (A truly critical requirement.)
We found moving between successive frames of negative strips very straightforward and accurate. Each of the six frame positions on the negative holder are identified by a separate section of the hinge that forms the backbone, marked with an indented circle at the center of the frame. Detents clearly announce the centering of each frame with a comfortable "chunk".
We didn't have the opportunity to evaluate the optional APS (Advanced Photo System) film transport, which not only eliminates any possibility of problems with curled film, but which also provides for rapid "index" scans of an entire roll at a time. (The model A-10 APS adapter is a $199 option to the basic ES-10.)

Operation and User Interface

Supported Film Types

Test Results
As always with Imaging Resource reviews, we encourage you to let your own eyes be the final judge: Look at the sample images, download them, print them out on your own printer, and decide for yourself how well the ES-10 would meet your requirements!
Overall, we were quite pleased with the output from the ES-10, especially when we compared it to the output of high-end digital point & shoot cameras. There's no question (at least for now) that the combination of film + scanner blows away even the best digital point & shoot cameras. Direct comparison with our digital camera tests is somewhat confounded by the fact that we simply have different test targets for the two sets of devices. Even allowing for this discrepancy though, it's not hard to see the superior image quality this scanner offers over the best of the digicams. (Before we're accused of ignoring the many advantages of digicams though, we hasten to point out that they do have multiple benefits of their own, including immediate feedback, a low "hassle factor," and faster turnaround.)
We found the ES-10 capable of producing beautiful scans, albeit after a little preparatory twiddling of the scan controls. If you commonly use a single type of film for most of your shooting, you should be able to arrive at a set of default settings that reduce frame-to-frame tweaking to a minimum. In exchange for your setup efforts, scans from the ES-10 carry tremendous amounts of detail, and excellent color.
The default settings for slide scans tend to produce rather dark images. We found that setting the "Exposure Bias," "Shadow," and "Gamma" adjustments upward slightly produced good scans with excellent tonal gradation. We don't have a good translation between the grayscale on our Q60 test target and numeric density values, but believe that the maximum-density performance of the ES-10 will be adequate for the vast majority of users. (On the Ektachrome Q60 target, the ES-10 resolved density steps down to about step 20.) Once the basic exposure adjustments are made, the resulting images show excellent tonal gradation, color saturation, and color accuracy.
As mentioned above, color negative film is flat-out weird! We tried a variety of color films in the scanner, but standardized on Kodak Gold 100 for our "official" test images. (We could spend the rest of our lives trying all the variations and permutations of film manufacturers, emulsion types, and film speeds.) The provided set of preconfigured color profiles for color negative films from Agfa, Fuji, Kodak, Konica, and "Others" provide a broad range from which to select basic color profiles: Chances are, even if you aren't using one of these specific film types, you'll be able to get decent results by experimenting a bit to find the best match for your film.
In the case of our primary tests, using Kodak Gold 100 film, we chose the "Kodak Gold" color negative setting on the scanner software, and achieved good results overall. The Davebox target sample shows an overall yellowish cast that was typical of this combination (and which could doubtless have been removed through proper adjustment of the scanner software's Color controls). In practice, and particularly since we weren't doing large numbers of scans with the unit, we found that a simple "Auto Levels" operation removed the color cast in one step. Colors were very bright, clean, and highly saturated.
We found the ES-10's resolution to be very good, particularly in contrast to images from the digital cameras we've tested to date. While the ES-10's maximum resolution is "only" 1770 dpi, and Olympus sells it as a "3.84 Megapixel" scanner, the actual results were quite impressive. Look at the fine detail in the "House" clip, where the pine needles are seen against the sky. Look too at the resolution target clips. We found it interesting that the resolution of the ES-10 was quite different in the vertical and horizontal axes. It appears that the scanner is doing some interpolation along the vertical axis, and less or none in the horizontal direction. Visual resolution on the WG-18 target scan was roughly 1000 line pairs/picture height in the vertical direction, and 1300 horizontally.
See for Yourself!
Take a look at the test images from the ES-10, download them, print them out, see if the scanner meets your needs!
Conclusion
The ES-10 appears to be an excellent scanner for personal use: With minor tweaking, it produces images with resolution and color quality significantly exceeding even moderately-expensive (up to ~$1,500) digital cameras. While the combination of film-plus-scanner obviously lacks some of the convenience of the fully digital approach, a personal film scanner like the ES-10 could be the best choice for those reluctant to give up the flexibility of film.

For More Info

View the test images from the ES-10
Visit the Olympus web page for the ES-10