Review on Kodak P811BK Personal Negative Scanner by Ryan Lawson

Bought this for my parents who had to scan almost 2000 photos. Initially we encountered some problems. But later we decided that getting to know the "character" of this device is not "disappointing". Let me list some common problems that many users have mentioned in previous reviews and my pseudo diagnosis and then how to overcome them. 1) Vertical stripes appear and cleaning does not help: firstly, this is a real problem. But it's not the end of the world. I have to clarify my experience. The first photos we scanned were very good. When we took over 100 photos in one session, the quality started to degrade. Sometimes cleaning and/or calibrating and/or using a bushing improves quality, but not permanently. Very light vertical white lines and many more faint vertical white lines degraded the scan quality for particularly dark images. In my case it wasn't the end of the world. I decided that this is due to the dust that accumulates on the scanner, and partly also to the software photo correction - the program combines scanned pixels into one photo, taking into account calibration and scanning speed (the program in the device works may not be correct if a lot of dust has accumulated). I think the main mechanism here is the electrostatic force that traps the "clean-resistant" dust! This problem appeared after about 100-200 photos were scanned. When I turned the scanner off and left it for a few hours and then did a cleaning/calibration, the scan quality was restored. This allowed me to keep the same scan quality for batches of 100 photo shoots. (I also noticed heating, although I'm not sure if that could be causing the problem. But pausing can also help with heating.) One final warning: have a clean cloth handy to dust photos if they haven't been stored in it good condition. Condition. Do not use photos that have dirt/stains/tape on them unless you clean them. You can use an envelope to scan these photos, but don't ruin the envelope as it's also very useful. 2) Some printed photos may not scan properly. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about this problem. You may have noticed that printing paper has a different nature. Some are very shiny and sticky. Some are non-tacky and have an intentional roughness. And many more types of paper textures for printing. So you have to rely on your luck, some photos will always be scanned in lower quality. Using a sleeve (not a very "quick" way to scan a lot of photos) improves the quality to some extent. However, this problem also depends on the photo. If you have a colorful photo with lots of contrast and no large areas of dark colors, these are the ones that cause the least problems. (Side note: black and white photos probably won't cause any problems) Depending on the type of printing paper, very dark photos are the hardest to keep in good quality (to be honest these photos made up a very small portion of the albums we had so they can be scanned later with a bulky scanner) I recommend you set aside those very specific photos (which result in poor scan quality) and try to scan them as your first photos after not using the device for a few hours became . In summary, because of these issues, I don't think scanning directly to a memory card is a good way to use this device. I would recommend that you review the photos you scan every 10 scans. Take breaks of several hours and don't try to scan thousands of photos in one session. While these issues may seem annoying; After learning how to use this very inexpensive scanner, he liked it very much and wanted to keep it. He thinks it's like using an old car that becomes reliable once you get used to its "characteristics". I gave it 4 stars because it's cheap and there are ways around most issues unless you have a broken car. Other features I liked: It's very small, portable, the power adapter runs on 110/220 volts so you can take it with you when traveling abroad (with a plug adapter, of course). For example, I have relatives who live in Europe where 220V AC is the standard. Setup is easy. It worked with Windows 8.