10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Great for photos, rubbish for negs and slides
Date of Review: Apr 12, 2007
The Bottom Line: If you only need to scan prints, go for it. It's excellent for that. If you plan to scan film strips or slides, forget about it.
If you think about buying this scanner to scan negatives or slides, forget about it. The maximum optical resolution is 300 dpi, which in the case of film scanning is an absolute crap. You can get pictures good enough to send to friends via e-mail, but that's about it. They advertise a resolution of 4800x9600 dpi, but it's a lie. It scans at 300 dpi and then uses software interpolation to give you a bigger file with more pixels. That's rubbish. If you expect to get a decent level of detail from your slides, keep dreaming.
The colour tones are perfect, though.
The film and slide holder has a design fault. Although it's theoretically designed to hold up to four mounted slides, the holder is too thin and cannot be properly closed after you put your slides in. Maybe it would work with cardboard mounts (I don't know about that because I don't have any), but with plastic mounts, even with very thin ones, loading the slides into the scanner is a very tricky job.
Film strips are OK, though. They are easy to load and are held in place just fine.
Scanning photos is another matter. Here the scanner performs extremely well, especially when scanning glossy prints. The resulting image is indistinguishable from the original, having lots of details and perfect colours. 300 dpi seems to be more than enough for prints.
