Plustek temporarily halts shipment of OpticFilm 120 medium format scanner

Last September, Taiwanese scanner manufacturer Plustek announced a new flagship model for its OpticFilm lineup of film scanners. The Plustek OpticFilm 120 offers an impressive specification, scanning both 35mm and mediium format 120/220 film with frame sizes up to 6 x 12 and an optical resolution of 5,300 dpi, but unfortunately it's had something of a difficult birth.

Originally planned to go on sale from early October 2012, final development saw the release schedule pushed back. In the US market, the OpticFilm 120 has only recently become available in limited quantities, some six months behind the originally-planned release date. Now, delivery of the OpticFilm has been halted once more -- this time due to an unspecified issue affecting image quality on a small percentage of OpticFilm 120 units.

 

The Plustek OpticFilm 120 medium-format film scanner recently started shipping, but it's since been taken off the market to resolve image quality issues with some units.

We reached out to Plustek for comment on the issue it had discovered, the schedule for a solution and resumption of shipments, and to confirm whether these issues might be of concern to customers who'd already received their scanners. Their response was as follows:

"We discovered that a few of the OpticFilm 120 scanners coming out of production for weren’t up to our high quality standards. We immediately stopped production and hired a quality control company to identify which tolerance parts were degrading image quality.  They are still being tested.

Delivery of pre-ordered units had commenced in the US market, but we hadn’t shipped all of the pre-ordered scanners before production stopped. We’re developing a plan to make sure that customers' scanners are all functioning properly. From what we can tell at this point, the number of scanners with quality issues is extremely limited -- it was a small percentage of the number of scanners in production.   We’ve been in contact with those customers who received scanners that weren’t up to our standards, and we’re working with them directly to make sure the issues are resolved.

We’re hoping for shipments to resume as soon as possible, but we won’t release anything until it reaches our high quality standards.  We’re hoping this will be in a matter of weeks, but we can’t pinpoint the timeline right now.

We believe that we’ve identified every unit that had problems, and handled the situation with each individual, since the scanners were still on pre-order.  If any consumers have problems, we encourage them to call us at: 714-670-7713 or visit http://plustek.com/usa/support."

 

Plustek doesn't yet have a firm date for OpticFilm 120 deliveries to resume.

Customers who have in some cases been waiting several months for delivery of their preorders are reacting with frustration on the company's Facebook page, but given that the issue affects image quality, a pause in production while the cause is found seems the responsible thing to do. Kudos to Plustek for recognizing the issue and taking action swiftly; hopefully shipments of the OpticFilm 120 will be resumed in the not too distant future.