I am an avid photo taker. I have thousands of photos from the past 40 years. A couple of years ago, I looked for something you could feed old photos into that would scan them into your computer. Nothing was available but then, a few months ago, I found the Kodak 4x6 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner (P460) at Amazon.com and ordered it. When it arrived I used the "quick start" directions and hooked it up to my computer. Within minutes, I was feeding old photos through the device and they were appearing in a photo file on my desktop. I fed photos through the thing all day yesterday. When I finally got tired of loading photos, I had scanned nearly 500 into my computer. The rate that this thing operates is amazing. You place the edge of the photo in the feed slot, it gives you a couple of seconds to readjust, then the motor quietly feeds the photo through, scanning it into your computer. Then, a couple of seconds later, the photo appears in the photo file on the desktop and the machine is ready for another photo. I tested it to see how many photos I could load in a minute and fed between six and seven during the sixty second period. The scanned images were often times better than the wrinkly old photograph I started with. The only thing that slowed me down was that I labeled each photo as it appeared on my desktop. The Kodak 4x6 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner (P460) did everything the ad claimed it would do and more. I was totally satisfied with it and could not say enough good things about it.
This is a wonderful, portable scanner. You could sit and watch tv, and scan your old photos on your lap, its ultra light. Other scanners do more robust projects. But if you just want to get a bunch of your old 4x6's on an sd card...this is the way to go. It does one picture at a time; but quickly. The quality was great.
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Edited 2012-05-04 to add 2500 photos and still going strong! I also scanned in 25 business cards and 10 post cards. The post cards were mostly too thick and I gave up on them and will use the flatbed scanner for them. The business cards worked well except for a few that were extra thick.
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I purchased right before the holidays so I could scan some old family pictures to give away on CDs. I am now on my 6th album and well over 1000 photos, and I can say that this little machine is still producing excellent scans (considering it is only 600 dpi).
1. Concerning one reviewer's comments about mysterious lines could be dirty photos. Some of the really old photos had not been cared for well and were dirty. I found that blowing them off with canned air helped to prevent dust from getting on the scanner glass. Also, I ran the cleaning cycle between each of those photos. That solved the lines on the photos issues. My non-dirty photos did not have this problem and I ran the cleaning cycle about every few hundred photos with those.
2. Get the 600 dpi version; MUCH nicer scans than 300 dpi. Of course, my flat bed scanner will do 1200 dpi; however, it is such a pain to do 3x5 or 4x6 photos on it, that it just wasn't happening. I have several thousand MORE 3x5 & 4x6 photos to scan. There is no way I would do it with my flat bed scanner. (I am the family historian and archivist)
3. As mentioned in a different review not having to be connected to a computer is awesome! I took this scanner to work and scanned in the break room at lunch, and have also scanned at the coffee shop while chatting with friends. Very cool.
4. I do not use the kodak software, so I cannot comment on that.
5. I still use the flat bed scanner for "extra special" photos where I really want to capture the detail; however, for the 99.95 % of the rest of my photos, this is the perfect solution. Also, I have some damaged photos, and those go on the flat bed, also.
6. I waited until I had scanned a significant number of photos before I posted a review so that I could be confident of its durability. I was concerned that after 500 or so scans, that maybe the little motor would burn out. I scan at least 100 photos during a session, and everything continues to be working well. And as stated before, well over 1000 photos and still going strong.
7. It is so easy to use that I will be letting my 7 year old granddaughter help me scan over the New Year's holiday. (Maybe she will become the historian and archivist for her generation?)
All in all, an excellent little scanner for the price.
Read Best Reviews of Kodak P460 Personal Photo Scanner Here
The compact nature of this machine is what attracted my buying it. Set up was easy, but by the 3rd picture scanned, there appeared a thin white line down the middle of the scanned photo. Then I scanned another picture, it was OK. Another picture was scanned and there were two vertical lines. Some pictures were scanned with good result. Looking at the originals, there was no indication of why this would happened. Read the instructions again, and try the "calibrate" card, but did not helped.
Then I gave up scanning photos, so I tried the negatives. The result was acceptable, but needed some color correction. The machine prefers to scan the images into the SD card, and "supposedly" is able to scan directly into the computer with an USB and the software provided. I scanned more negatives into the computer, then later when I tried to do that again, it only was able to scan into the SD card, despite what I selected on the software screen.
So this was returned to Amazon.
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After looking as several variants of this product from Kodak and Pandigital (the maker of Kodak's models), I chose the P460. It was very easy to set up, very quick, and very easy to use.
I ran a few pictures through without the included sleeve as the sleeve seemed inconvenient and I actually hadn't found it yet. It was tucked into the French part of the user's guide. Anyway, the first picture was fine but I very quickly started to get white strips in the images. I am guessing that dust gets trapped in the mechanism and you get a white line where the dust blocks the scanner's view of the photo.
I then cleaned the scanner following the manual's instructions and used the sleeve. The lines went away. Reasonably happy with the results, I set about scanning a whole bunch of photos. As the P460 scans onto the included SD card, I couldn't see the results. After a few dozen, I put the card into my computer to see how it was going. I was very disappointed. Slowly dust had accumulated in the sleeve. Even though I couldnt see the dust, the scanner could see it and the photos got increasingly speckled with white spots and curvy lines of lint. And then the white strips returned!
I also found the quality of the scans to be irregular. Some scans looked great, others looked all washed out. Some scans were mottled and fuzzy when the original photo was not. So I took a photo and ran it through the P460 and my regular flatbed scanner and then I compared the results. The flatbed scanner's quality was hands down superior. Not only was there no dust accumulation problem, the overall quality of the scan was much better. The P460's image comes over looking "flat" and obviously scanned. I was scanning at 600dpi in both scanners, but the image file size from the P460 came out 1/3 the size as the flatbed. The compression takes out a lot of the nuances in the colors of the image leaving a poor result. Another complaint is the the edges of the photo would still need to be cropped as the automatic job that is done isn't perfect and often leaves a white or black edge.
I am sending this back and now have no solution for scanning about 1500 photos other than by going the slow flatbed route :(
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Very often, the button would get stuck and the powerpoint would advance many many pages at once. It happened no matter how carefully I clicked them. Also, the clicking sound is VERY LOUD. Do not buy it!
