Review on KODAK Mini Digital Slide Scanner by Travis Coffman

I looked at a lot of these little slide scanners before settling on this one. That's about double the price of most no-name slide and film scanners sold at Revain. After going through some old 35mm slides, the LCD had intermittent horizontal banding and noise issues (see video) which led me to return it. He also tended to switch off for no apparent reason. Even without these flaws, it didn't fit me at all. Image quality is hardly acceptable unless you look too closely, but all images produced had an unacceptable level of grainy noise, like the texture of an orange peel. Some experiments with an optical microscope and a flatbed scanner have confirmed that this noise is not related to film grain or anything else on the slide itself. It will indicate whether you are using the interpolated 22MP setting or the standard 11MP setting. If anything, images captured at lower settings look slightly better, with no noticeable loss of resolution. I have attached 3 1:1 scale images of the same slide of a vintage Ford Fiesta taken in 3 different ways. The first shot was taken with a scanner setting of 22 MP, the second shot at 11 MP and the third shot from my Epson V300 flatbed scanner at 600 dpi. While colors are good on the Kodak scanner, orange peel artifacts are unacceptable. I have several different photo editors but I can't find a global filter that would make them better. Reducing the image size to about 25% of the original helps a little, but graininess is still visible and you lose detail in the process. I bought this unit because I have a collection of over 700 old 35mm color slides that my father took between 1950 and 1978. 80% of them were removed before 1961. This is the only tape I own from my childhood, so I didn't want to send it for commercial digitization. My flatbed scanner only scans 4 slides at a time and it takes about a minute to scan each of them well. i need something faster It seemed like a good decision and it goes by the Kodak name. However, performance is similar to scanners that sell for $60-$80 and I suspect they are made in the same factory as the cheaper models. To be honest I haven't tried using any of these scanners as they have pretty poor coverage here so I don't know if they are the same, better or worse. There are other problems with the device. Bare Bones Feature Set. There are several brightness and color correction options, but they appear to be applied in post-processing, not during the actual scan. There's no backlight correction and the white balance seems wrong in images with lots of highlights and dark areas. The computer interface is completely stupid. The device works as a card reader, but only when it is powered on and the USB boot option is selected. However, it will not work when plugged into a USB 3.0 port, you must use a free 2.0 port. If you have pictures stored on the device's internal memory, you must remove the SD card to view them and the device will automatically turn off when you remove or insert it. There are no other computer controls because, for example, the device does not work as a TWAIN source and you cannot view images on the computer screen while they are being scanned. If the slide is in the middle of the scan area, something will be cut off. It just crops the edges a bit, but anything shot in portrait orientation on the camera itself will need to be side-scanned and rotated 90° in an image editor on your computer, unless you want to crop much of the image when shooting . you scan it The scanner has options for 180° rotation or horizontal rotation, but not for portrait orientation. I am disappointed that this does not meet my needs. If anyone knows of a better option, I'm all ears.