I was a little apprehensive about purchasing this small photo scanner. I have literally 1000's of photos from years and years of family photos, trips, candid moments, heirlooms, etc. that have begun to fade, turn pink or become brittle with age. So I was anxious to find something that would allow me to quickly scan in my huge photo and negative collection giving me good color and pixel resolution and photo-to-screen reasonable definition without costing me a fortune. This small scanner has been worth every dollar.
PROS: The set up is fast and easy. For starters, the scanner came complete with a power cord or I could insert four AAA batteries and make it completely mobil. The usb connection cable tethered the scanner to my PC or laptop. I also have the option of downloading the scanned photos to the 4 GB MicroSD Card that comes with it that is easily inserted into the back of the scanner. My first scan, I chose to download the scans to my laptop. The software to complete that setup is on the MicroSD card. The software setup was quick and in just minutes I was scanning in my first photo. After 50-100 photo scans, I cleaned the rollers with the cleaning tool supplied with the scanner. Despite reviews that gave negative feedback concerning white lines on the photos, the tool did the trick and kept my photos crisp and clean. There is also a sleeve for photos that are too curled, thin, too small, or just need a little TLC to make it through the scanner. I love this little scanner and can't wait to start on my negatives. I highly recommend this scanner for those who are looking for a quick and easy way to archive their old photos. I'll update my review once I have begun to scan in my negatives. Also, the description online said it will scan up to 8"x10" but it will actually accept a 8 1/2" x 11" piece of paper.
CONS: It only scans in one format, JPG. I would have liked PDF so I could scan in my recipes, magazine articles and receipts. When you use the JPG format the files are rather large. I can scan them in as a JPG and then print them to a PDF but that is just extra work. I would also have liked the ability to control the JPG size on the scanner itself.
Overall, I am very pleased with this scanner. I don't think you will be disappointed with the functionality.
PROs, CONs, and NEUTRALS
If you've got the daunting project of scanning thousands of old photos without wanting to spend 5-10 minutes fiddling on each one, then this little device is going to work really well for you. If you're looking for super high quality scans worthy of an photography gallery, choose a more professional flatbed scanner and prepare to spend the next two years hunched over in a dungeon with your klunky PC.
PROS:
Scans directly to a memory card without an external computer!
Up and running in less than 10 minutes, which includes breaking it out of the box, reading the quick start guide and two pages of the user guide, and guessing that the power button doubles as the resolution selector.
Easy to use. Examples:
1. Stick your SanDisk in the back first. Then plug in the device. Toggle between 600 dpi (amber) and 300 dpi (green) by pressing the power button. Hold the power button for two seconds to turn off, or hold again to turn on again.
2. To scan a photo, insert the photo directly into the slot. It will automatically feed itself!
Fast scans.
600 dpi (amber light): 8"x10" took 32 seconds. Anything inside the plastic sleeve will take 32 seconds to go through the scanner (since the speed is the same to process the same sized sheet, regardless of the size of the photo inside it.) Smaller photos fed into the scanner without the sleeve will still be between 25-31 seconds.
300 dpi (green light): 8"x10" took 10.8 seconds. Anything inside the plastic sleeve will take 9-10 seconds
Plastic sheath included. The plastic sleeve is about 8.75" long, and is used to protect older or frayed or bent photos.
Really small. About 10.5" long x 2.25" deep x 1.875" high. P.S. It operates similar to a NeatReceipts-style scanner, but without a PC and other software.
Portable. Runs on batteries (but I use the included power cord.)
Once you put the photo in, the scanner rolls the photo through by itself, so you're not holding it the whole time.
Good value. It's a scanner that can cost less than $100 in some places.
CONS:
Sometimes if you don't feed the photo straight, it will go through crooked, and you can't stop it midway, as the scanner doesn't open. You would end up yanking the photo out. It'll let you, but that's probably not a good idea since it's those internal rollers that roll the photo for you. Wouldn't want to damage them or the photo!
The plastic sheath won't cover anything larger than a 5x7 photo. So you'll just need to feed larger photos directly without the sleeve, or use a regular flatbed scanner.
Only one plastic sheath. Not sure how to get replacements, as I could see it getting lost or frayed or destroyed by children/pets. I suppose you could just get a normal office transparent, thin binder sleeve to substitute, but I haven't tried.
Occasionally, the feed won't start right away, or starts too quickly. But it recovers quickly just by pulling the photo out quickly before it goes in too far, and trying again. (See the caveat about the rollers above, though.)
You do need to feed the photo and take it out once it's gone through. It doesn't spit the photo out, but will sort of continue scanning until you pull the end out completely.
NEUTRAL:
This scanner assumes you just need decent but not super high quality scans of relatively flat photos no wider than 8". (Length can be a little more than 10".)
You *must* have a memory card in the memory card slot in order to scan, even if you are scanning to a machine. (Someone please confirm.)
I did encounter the white line that another reviewer mentioned, but in my case, it cleared up once I used the enclosed cleaning tool. There is a little paper guide on the scanner that you adjust to fit the size of the photo being fed. I notice that I have problems if my photo ends up really pushing against that plastic guide. Hard to explain--think of it like trying to squeeze a bed through the doorway. A part of it might compress, and I think that was partially responsible for my white line. Yes, I admit: user error.
OTHER FUNCTIONALITY:
It saves all the photos as *.jpg format to a folder on the memory card called PHOTO# (where # refers to a number, starting with 1.)
You can scan to a desktop/laptop with the included software if you wish
Hope that helps! Comments and questions for clarification are welcome. Happy digitizing of old photos!
[11/18/2011 Update]
I read the user guide and discovered two additional things to note:
This product is made by Pandigital for Kodak.
There is a calibration card included that can be run through the scanner to calibrate it and help with the white lines.
Last night, I scanned 40 photos & rescanned 7 of them in the space of about an hour. The seven redos had white lines before I had to rescan them, clean and calibrate.
I'll update again if I decide that the error rate is too great. 7 out of 40 photos is a lot to redo, especially when you start getting into hundreds of photos.
Buy Kodak P811BK 8x10 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner Now
I have 3 generations of photos that I treasure and wanted to scan them and preserve them on a stick/disc. Using my printer/scanner was going to take mega hours of work. Using my new Kodak P811BK scanner I have really cut the time down and only have one more storage bin of albums to do. This is the fastest most efficient scanner I have ever used and I highly reccommend this to anyone with a daunting scanning job facing them.
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So I did a lot of research and ended up buying this scanner because it does 8x10 pictures. It was a great choice. It does what it advertises, I have not tried to do the disconnected battery-powered scanning or transparency/negative scanning, though.
Ok, so here is the low-down on this scanner:
Can scan pictures at 300 dpi or a higher resolution 600 dpi. When you turn it on it defaults to 600 dpi. My pictures average about 1 MB in size, through the range is from about 700KB to about 2.2MB. These are normal 4x6 pics mostly. for negatives and transparencies the scanner is hardwired to do 1200 dpi, which is probably a good thing. I did not scan any negatives or transparencies.
If you scan while connected to a computer you do not need a memory card inserted into the scanner. Comes with a 4GB memory card which is nice to have.
Comes with two software programs/installers: One is the driver program which allows you to scan to a folder on your computer. This program does not do much more than that. The second program is Kodak's image editing software, which I did not try out or install.
After installation the scanner "just works". I have an IBM/PC computer. This is a great thing to say because usually that's what you need out of your electronics. I have never had it fail on me.
If you have the scanner connected to a computer while scanning, then you can check your photos right away, which is invaluable. I would not scan pics into a feed-through scanner like this without checking each and every photo. It's just physically impossible to have a perfect scan every time in this type of scanner. This will get crooked due to user error. For this reason I do not use the battery-powered, hope for the best mode. I check each picture as I scan them to make sure the scan is acceptable.
There have been some comments about white lines in the pictures. I have experienced them too. I have found there are actually two problems and people are getting them mixed up: There is a white line problem, where the line is a single pixel wide and the pixel is completely white. This is fixed with a re-calibration with the included calibration card and a re-scan. It just happens every once in a while, I would not say it happens too much. The second problem I would bet is a bug in the scanner firmware. This is a line, several pixels wide that "eats" part of a photo. As a software engineer, I can say with some certainty that this is a firmware bug. It is probably a certain sequence of binary values in the digitized picture that causes this. You do not need to re-calibrate to get a good second scan, simply run the picture again. I never had it happen twice on the same picture. But no matter what the cause is, these two conditions happen very rarely. I am not knocking off any points for this, that's how rare it is.
The scanner comes with a plastic envelope/holder for pictures. Use it; even if your pictures can be run fine through the scanner without the envelope. The envelope does wonders for having scans that are aligned on the first try.
If you have pictures with dark edges (for example a picture taken at night where one or more edges of the picture are very dark), then the scanner will sometimes get confused as to where the picture actually ends. So if you have a picture that is 4x6, for example, the scanned picture may look to be 4x4. to solve this, I put something brighter behind the picture at the dark edge (a sticky note gave me goods results), and that will force the scanner to scan the whole picture and not throw out the dark part of the image. The downside of this is that now you have a picture that is too large, and you need to crop it with an image editor. To me this is much better than having a picture that is too small, but you make your own decision.
The resolution is great on this, as is the quality of the scan. I think the quality of the (old?) prints becomes a problem much sooner than the quality of the scanner. The 600 dpi resolution is great for making enlargements. Just don't expect to make a 2ft by 3ft poster out of these images. The real limitation will be the quality of the original pictures much more than the quality of the scan.
This scanner works awesome as a document scanner. It will take an 8.5" paper, so you can scan legal or letter size documents.
It really helps to have a good image editing software available to align photos, crop out edges, correct colors (old pictures you may scan will have faded colors, processing errors from the original picture development, and so on). Many pictures that I had looked far better after color and exposure corrections than the original pictures. I used Adobe Photoshop to correct my pics, I did not install the software that came with the scanner, so I cannot comment on the included software.
The one thing that I would watch out for is that the scanner comes with one calibration card (to calibrate simply feed it through the scanner, it could not any easier) and one plastic envelope for the pictures. I do not know how I would get a replacement for either, so keep the calibration card crystal clean. I put mine on a ziploc by itself to accomplish this. It would be good to be able to buy more of either accessories for backup.
Overall this was a great scanner to sit down with in front of your laptop and reminisce with the family about old times as you scan and double check your images. I just sat there for several evenings scanning my big pile of pictures and it's kind of sad they're all done. I need to visit my mother and do the same on her picture albums :-)
I'll give this scanner a perfect score as there is really nothing to bump down the score for. It does what it promises, with rare hiccups. I would not scan battery powered (btw, the manual insists that you yse rechargeable batteries if on battery power) without checking the pictures as you scan. That simply is putting too much faith on a feeder scanner. Too many things can go wrong to just assume all scans will be perfect on the first try.
Overall I am very happy with this purchase.
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Loved the convenience and size of this item. Have scanned many old photos as well as documents. The images were clear and crisp....love it!
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Important things to know:
