Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Our family has slides. My parents have over 6,000 slides, I have reels and reels of slides that my grandfather took, my brother has a few thousand, and I have probably a few thousand myself. This device is a lifesaver! Yes, it sometimes jams. Yes, the software has it's problems. Yes, it's slower than slow. However, in the end it does a good job and best of all it does the scanning mostly without any help. We got this in Fall 2007 and my parents have finished their 6,000, and I'm working through mine and my grandfather's.
This scanner comes with a straight tray that holds 50 slides. We wanted the ability to pack one tray while the other is running so we bought two circular ones from the manufacturer that each hold 100 slides. We highly recommend doing this -- the circular ones jam much less than the included straight one. The scanner does about 9 or 10 slides per hour.
We're using this scanner on Mac OS X using Firewire -- haven't tried it with a PC or using the USB connection. We've used it on both Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) -- make sure that you download the Leopard update from the manufacturer's website if you're on Leopard. The software itself is quirky, and it has a very unintuitive interface that I suppose shows it's Windows origins.
The typical process for setting it up
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1. Close all unnecessary apps (My mom needs to do this on her system with 1GB of RAM. I have 3GB and don't have to do this.)
2. Turn on scanner (takes a minute or two)
3. Start CyberView X software
4. Load tray into scanner. Use arrows on scanner to line up with notch on circular reel showing #1 slide.
5. From Scan menu, select Scan, then select Multi-Scan to File
6. Enter the number of slides in this batch.
7. Select where you want to write the scan files.
8. Select file type (TIF or JPG), and if JPG, also select output quality (Good, Better, Best).
9. Click Ok
There's two types of jams: 1) the slide didn't make it into the scanner, so the scan is of nothing! 2) more serious jams when it can't move the slide. In this case, it just shuts down. We have yet to have a slide damaged by this machine.
When we finish a batch, we check for any duds -- scans that turned out like white frames because of a jam -- then we rescan just those duds. The scanner has the capability to let you feed individual slides in manually, and we have to do that on rare occasions.
Tips to reduce jamming
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1) Put 'em in straight. Take care to put the slides straight into the slot in the tray.
2) Unbend. Make sure the slides aren't warped or tweaked. If they are try making them straight again. We had some 40-50 year old cardboard mounts that had been in Honeywell trays for about that long that were bent.
3) Trim the mounts. We had some old cardboard mounts that weren't mounted correctly -- the two halves didn't quite match. This made the mount a bit larger than it should be so we used scissors to carefully trim the extra edges. This made the slides fit better into the tray without bending or going in crooked.
As for the image -- we've seen some banding, and the colors don't seem as rich as the original slides, but that can be fixed with post processing. See the examples I uploaded.
Summary
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This scanner takes some getting used to as it whirrs, grinds, and make other noises, and you'll probably need to rescan some that got jammed, but over all it's a great time saver!
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