FILM SCANNER

Pleasantly surprised with this. I bought it to digitise my old slide collection and didn't have terribly high expectations given the price. However, it's simple to use and, viewed on a large screen TV the results are really pretty good. I haven't looked closely at the scans on a decent monitor yet, or tried to manipulate them but for casual showing to friends and family it's fine. The bulk slide loader is frustrating in that it jams easily but it's also easy to unblock. I scanned some 400 slides in a few hours then watched them by directly connecting the scanner via USB to my PS4. Simples and no extra power supply needed. The LCD screen is basic and low Res but the fact that the scanner does not need to be connected to a PC is a great benefit. This is not a scanner for the enthusiast but for digitising those old slides or 35mm film negs ( though I have not tried that yet ) it does a decent job.

Just like most people buying a product like this, I have hundreds of old 35mm sides put away in boxes and never looked at. I thought I'd buy this and finally store at least some of the slides. I unpacked and read the quick instructions and was up and running in a few minutes. I tried the flat 4-window carrier and it worked just fine but was rather slow so I tried the stack filler. This worked fine with the thicker plastic slides but kept jamming with cardboard or very thin slides. However, I found that, even just putting the slides in one by one into this carrier, it was quicker than using the flat 4-window carrier. You have to push the slide in carefully to prevent misalignment, but all in all the system worked fine. It's difficult to comment on the sharpness or colour accuracy without projecting the slides and comparing with the scanned image but they looked fine and I was happy to have digitised versions of those old images. You can see each silde on the front projected face and you have the chance to adjust brightness/exposure before pressing capture. I just left it in mid position. The other choice is resolution 5 or 10M. I changed to 10M each time I turned the machine on. It plugs into a USB port to power up . You have to have a SD card pushed into the card slot for the machine to work even if plugged into a computer's USB port, which also powers the device. On my Windows computer, the machine appears as a folder and you can copy the photos and paste as you wish. Sometimes you have to pull the plug out and push back in again and do the same with the SD card on occasion. The machine also stores the images on the SD card and you can view them and delete if you wish from the computer or in stand-alone mode. Overall, the scanner does it's job. Not sure whether purists will find the images of the highest quality, but the machine is not expensive and is far better than the last one I had. I'm very pleased to have it and finally be able to show old pictures to my highly amused children!

Very useful piece of equipment particularly if you have a lot to do. I needed to digitise quite a few 35mm, half frame and some larger square format slides. There is no provision for the latter so while they can be fed in they will be cropped. I found that the feed mechanism sometimes jammed. Also slides with a thicker plastic mounting would not fit into the feeder. Quality is ok though I feel that some fine tuning of the focus would have been useful given the varying thickness of slide mountings. The instructions are not good and you need to have a practice session before throwing away any slides. Mine broke down after doing quite a few slides and refused to copy more than one slide at a time without being restarted. It is being returned but I will buy a replacement as I expect I had just a bad example. I suppose that I had done about 800 slides and the rest of the device is still in very good order. I had expected some wear on the feed mechanism but this was not the case. Negative digitising is fine but obviously more fiddly as feeding has to be done with a tray. A good way of getting slide copying done. Unfortunately the price of this item has increased significantly so will now be looking for an alternative.

I looked into the digitising my slides via a company, but the cost was too great; advertise 30p per slide but that is only if you have thousands. I have culled mine to about 200 and was quoted £200. I bought from Amazon DIGITNOW FILM SCANNER, You will also need an SD card. It transfers negative and slides and lets you adjust resolution, (although I did not do that as I didn't understand it) and exposure, which I used a lot. There is an feed so you can stack your slides and easily scan them, a viewing screen so you can adjust exposure etc. The feeder does not work with plastic mounted slides but there is a 4 slide mount that you can put them in before you scan which is not too laborious. I didn't use that negative feeder. After you scan the slides onto the SD card you then connect to your computer and upload them. For speed, my computer is slow, I located the SD card on my computer then dragged the contents onto my desktop. The instructions are in Chinglish so it takes some patience to sort it out, also realising that slides are 'positives' (duh) but once I got it I was away. Top tip, it comes with a brush to clean the optic. when you do that make sure that the brush head is facing down, mine was facing up and I had a very panicky moment when it got stuck. It was such a great project and I really enjoyed it.