Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Guerdon Draper photo
1 Level
799 Review
36 Karma

Review on πŸ–ΌοΈ Pandigital PANSCN06 Personal Photo Scanner/Converter - Easily Digitize and Preserve Your Memories by Guerdon Draper

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Huge improvement over flatbed scanners

We have had flatbed scanners for years but they are so cumbersome and slow to use that we have never made a decent dent in the 2 boxes of old photo prints that we and our families have did in the many decades before we switched to digital cameras about 10 years ago. It looks like this sheetfed scanner from Pandigital is about to change all that. For each photo we didn't spend 2-5 minutes - placing, cropping, scanning, deleting and saving as a file - but only a few seconds at a time! So far we've only scanned about 60 photos with the PANSCN06, but we're very happy with its performance. Whatever the qualitative differences between it and our tablet, when scanning faded photographs from 30 to 50 years ago, many of which are only black and white, they are completely invisible. We find the scans from the new machine to be quite passable and only use the default setting of 300 dpi (and one of us has 25 years of graphics experience). It's just great for this kind of work. The biggest problem at the moment is that around 60% of the photos are fed in askew and thus scanned. We could mitigate this if we wanted to mess with the provided transparent media folder, but it's much easier to just fix such scans with standalone editing software. And while we're at it, we're also improving the look of old photos, often taken with cheap cameras. One area where Pandigital has saved money is in the included software, which also lets you scan straight to your computer by bypassing the included 4GB SD card (although that card needs to be in its slot anyway, so that the device works, regardless of whether you save on it or not). The program does not allow you to define your own file naming convention. Worse, if after each batch of scans you stop editing and move them from the default folder (card or computer) to a more permanent folder for storage, the program will start numbering new scans "PD_0001" again. We had 3 sets of duplicate filenames before we realized what was going on. Very bad process design! He has other problems but nuff said. Hence our 4 star rating.

Pros
  • Worth your money
Cons
  • Annoying