Slide & Negative Scanner Digital Film Scanner with Large 5

 

The video goes into much more detail, including a demo of the unit in action.

However, in a nutshell:

Things I liked:

+ Super simple operation. Although I have only used this to digitise negatives, it is very, very straightforward to take the negative, feed it through the unit and then take a snapshot to be saved directly to an SD card. See the video for a demo of this.
+ There aren’t many controls, but this makes it quite straightforward to use. If you’re wanting a lot of control over fine-tuning the image, this might not be for you.
+ The design means it’s actually very fast to digitise large numbers of negatives.
+ You do get some control over the Red, Green, Blue colour balance as well as the brightness. But that’s about it.

Things I didn’t like:

– The build quality of the unit isn’t amazing feeling. For example, the buttons are very clicky and the unit is very lightweight. However, I haven’t had any problems with it.
– The quality of the digitised pictures is fine for my purposes. However, it is not a photo lab. When I compare the digital images that I got with the photos that were printed out from these negatives in a professional lab, the professional lab ones are obviously better.
– The photos that came out initially were quite dark and quite red. However, the controls on the unit allowed me to increase the green and blue and increase the brightness to maximum, which greatly increased the quality of the pictures that I was getting out of it. Any colour setting changes that you make are remembered for the next time you use it.

Do I recommend it?

Yes. I think you need to make sure your expectations are set appropriately though. This is not a digital photo lab. It is a very small unit that passes a light through a negative or slide to a fairly inexpensive sensor and takes a photo. It’s great for digitising images that you only have on film, negative or slide and enabling you to save the files so that you’ve got them whenever you want them on your phone, computer or cloud service of choice. However, if you are planning on printing these out, this is probably not going to be what you expect. You will probably have to spend a lot more on a more expensive unit. For my purposes, this is absolutely fine.

 

This awesome ShooCoo Slide & Negative Digital Film Scanner with Large 5″ LCD Screen comes well packaged in a box, supplied with everything you need to get started including the scanner, a cleaning brush to wipe dust from slides and negatives, USB cables, HDMI cables, power adapters, 110 negative film brackets, 110 positive film brackets, Super-8 clips, 135 film stents, and a booklet of full instructions.

I’m helping my grandfather work his way through digitising his collection of old family photos and this scanner has become an invaluable piece of kit as it means we can scan negatives of photos which have become faded, damaged or lost.

The scanner is easy to use and provides clear scan results in the form of JPGs, which can then be uploaded online for the rest of our family to enjoy. It has a 128MB built-in memory and can hold an SD card up to 128GB. Connecting the scanner via USB cable to your PC allows you to transfer the files easily and quickly.

There are controls on top of the scanner which allow you to manually control the brightness and saturation of your scanned photos, although the scanner does automatically optimise each scan but it is nice to be able to fine tune this yourself without the need for expensive photo software. The large screen makes this task a breeze to achieve as you can see your results in real time.

I highly recommend this scanner!