Photo,NameCard,Slide & Negative Scanner with Large 5″ LCD

I got this scanner to scan some old photos and negatives from the pre-digital days that I wanted to upload and share digitally. For some, the photos have been damaged so the negative was the last real backup of these pictures.

Taking out of the box, I was initially underwhelmed. There are no motorised parts, it feels quite light and the plastic construction does not feel premium.

However, in use, it has performed better than I expected. It’s powered either by a USB-A cable to your computer or can operate standalone, plugged into the wall (power brick and cable included). You initially make a choice with a slider, as to whether you want to scan photos on the top (guides provided for 5″x7″, 4″x6″, 3.5″x5 and “business card” to ensure straight alignment), or whether you want to scan negatives/slides (135mm /110mm negative strip, 135mm /110mm positive/negative slides).

Annoyingly the 135mm notches to hold the slides didn’t perfectly align to the negative strip I was scanning (they were all offset 2mm), so I ignored the notches and adjusted the slide after magnetically sealing in its holder.

Then, I saw a full colour, high-quality image of a frame of the negative on the on-device screen. I was blown away – quality and colour was excellent. There were a few dots of dust (my fault for not cleaning before I put it in), but it was a very good quality capture. I manually slid the holder in further to see the other frames in the negative strip. I then pressed “scan” and the image was saved to the (included) 8GB memory card. No noise, no beeps, no motors – instant capture! I should add that two resolutions are available, 14 megapixels and 22 megapixels.

Sliding the Film/Photo setting to “Photo” I loaded up a 6″x4″ photo, using the guides to line up the image correctly. You enter the size of the photo and with the guides, it cropped the image perfectly. Photos were bright and crisp and remained distortion-free even at multiple magnifications. At 100% (22megapixels) it does distort, but you’d realistically not be magnifying anything to that resolution that you’ve taken at 6″x4″. You can also perform minor edits on its big bright screen (Mirror/flip, RGB adjust and exposure correction)

USB to PC mode allows you to read the SD card as if it was a separate drive and you can copy across the files if you don’t have a SD card reader.

Several other tools are included to help remove the dust – a brush and a lint-free cloth.

Overall, this is a surprisingly good scanner. It’s not by any means perfect – the misaligned 135mm notches was a frustration, and if you’re scanning multiple images, it can be time consuming to align each before scanning. The scanning screen is also relatively small (up to 13cm x 18cm). But the quality of capture is excellent. On top of that, you can operate the entire device independently of a PC.