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1302 Review
35 Karma

Review on πŸ“Έ Rybozen Mobile Film and Slide Scanner: Transform Your Smartphone Camera into a Fun Toy for Scanning and Playing with Old 35mm Films & Slides, Featuring LED Backlight and Rugged Plastic Folding Design - Perfect Gift Idea! by Luke Hodes

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Good, but.

A cheap slide scanner for smartphones (actually a digitizer) has just arrived. My very old PrimeFilmThat scanner makes much better copies, but its drivers no longer work with my Windows 8 and 10 computers. However, for $30 I think it's a pretty good deal. My Android phone (Moto G6) had a few issues that I had to work through first. The distance between the phone's lens and the film is too small for the Moto to focus, but I was able to fix this by inserting a half-inch spacer. to move the phone a little further away from the slide. It was necessary to use the Moto camera's manual controls to get acceptable copies. Moto's manual controls include manual focus and exposure, and the camera also offers a manual "zoom" for framing the slide image. (Note that "scaling" the digital image reduces the resolution of the image.) I'm assuming the device is for the iPhone, but it's a shame the designer didn't spend a little more time on it to work with Android phones. The big issue is lens spacing and it would be very easy to fit half inch stands to extend the support rods. The lens hole is not suitable for Moto. The slide holder is not suitable for metal slides. The backlight background is rectangular so will not work with square slides. Also, I did NOT use the app that provides the scanner. To test, I simply took images uploaded to Google Photos, went to Google Photos and cropped them to the right size. Any good image processing software like IrfanView allows you to use the scanner to get many images and then use batch processing. for example rotation to fix multiple images at once. You can also scan 35mm negatives and convert them to positive in bulk using IrfanView.

Pros
  • slide and negative scanner
Cons
  • boring packaging