DIGITNOW! 135 Film Negative Scanner High Resolution Slide Viewer,Convert 35mm Film &Slide to Digital JPEG Save into SD Card, with Slide Mounts Feeder No Computer/Software Required

I worked as a photography business where we develops and/or arranged for the development of personal films. My slides to digital copier was expensive but could internally process the images to a certain extent internally. So, I am used to a higher quality scanner. I have over 100,000 slides of my own. I have already scanned 99% of them. However, a couple of years ago, my scanner stopped working. I am very old now so had a difficult time deciding what to do. Spend hundreds of dollars for am medium quality scanner or go with a scanner that only had a limited capability.Some changes in connection with the screen would be helpful. The angle of the screen should be 45deg instead of the very shallow angle it has. More importantly, the screen should be brighter.This scanner does exactly that. The only thing you can adjust internally is brightness. Any other adjustment you will have to do on your own computer. But I knew that limitation before making my purchase. I simply purchased something that can adequately scan slides but does not need to last very much longer. Because of the hundred of slides I have scanned over the years, I would rate it a 3 star because it does not automatically fix images before I return them to my customers.It is worth the money.

Image quality is pretty good, although colors are muted compared to the actual slide (holding them up to a light to view them). Increasing the brightness exposure control leads to washed out images. I often end up scanning at normal exposure and post-processing the scans to compensate for the muted color.Doesn't handle as many slide formats as others. I bought this and it was great for my 35mm slides, but then I found some "127" slides and this digitizer can't capture that format so I had to buy a different digitizer for those.One reason I chose this model was for the slide feeder to make it easy to feed in a lot of slides one after the next, but in my case the slides always jammed. It would have been a great idea if it worked. However, the standard slide holder accepts 4 slides at a time, and that's not so bad (other models only accept one at a time).

First, I need to say that when this scanner works, it actually works pretty well. So why the 1-star review?There are several flaws with the device and its software that suggest corners were cut in the design and development, enough testing wasn’t done, or the company was trying to produce the cheapest device possible.Online reviewers have focused most of their criticism on the fact that owners have to provide their own flash memory card. But given how inexpensive these cards are, this is an inconvenience at most.The following problems are far more important.1. The scanner has two settings, 5 megapixels (5M) and “interpolated” 10 megapixels (10M; which means, I guess, the slide is scanned twice at 5 MP and the images combined). Generally, the 10M setting works well, but if the image is too complex somehow, the device simply stops working. There’s no error message, no suggestion to reset to 5M and try again, nothing. It just stops and has to be disconnected from the computer it’s attached to. It can’t even be turned off.2. All slides must be scanned in landscape orientation, no matter how the image was shot. So while the device has an image mirroring/rotation tool, it will not rotate a portrait-oriented image to the correct orientation. And if the user tries to rotate images while viewing them using their computer’s image viewer, they might succeed a few times, but eventually not only will the device lock up, it will lock up their computer as well, forcing them to restart or reboot. Again, there’s no error message, no warning, and nothing in the user manual to warn of this problem. The images can only be rotated to their correct orientation after saving them to another computer.3. The device comes with three feeders: one that holds a strip of five negatives, one with slots for four slides, and one that holds a stack of roughly 20 slides. This latter one seemed like a good idea—it’s something none of the other scanners I considered had—but it doesn’t work. Slide frames vary in thickness—plastic frames are thicker than paper ones—so the feeder has to be able to accommodate all of them. As a result, paper-framed slides don’t consistently push an already-scanned slide out of the way as the user tries to move the next slide into place. It’s a good idea poorly executed.4. I had expected I’d be able to save images directly to my computer but I can’t. Users have to save the images to the flash drive, then link the scanner to the computer and copy them, or power off the scanner, remove the card, put it in the appropriate slot on their computer, and copy them that way. While this is more of an inconvenience than a serious problem, a better design would have allowed saving the images directly to a connected computer.On the positive side, when I’ve contacted DigitNow’s tech support, they’ve been reasonably responsive, getting back to me within 24 hours, and their answers have generally been helpful.Now that I know how to work around or avoid the problems listed above, I can reliably scan a couple dozen slides in about 15 minutes, and the scan quality certainly meets my needs. It’s easy to see why the scanner made it into other online reviewers’ top-10 lists but it would have gotten even better rankings if it had been better designed and the design better executed.

For $40, this is a great scanner. Indeed as others mentioned, it is somewhat flimsy, has software limitations, and requires some renovations for smooth physical operation. Make sure you have the smaller memory card 32G (these days all we had had were larger ones) it won't work with anything larger.See attached pictures for fixes:- file off several injection mold nibs (so slides don't catch preventing them from falling into place from the stack of slides - mfg plastic nib/whiskers prevent smooth dropping into place; very easily filed)- install a diagonal rail/guide so slides don't catch on poorly designed plastic protruding corner- bend the hold-down leaf spring tabs so they do their work - as-was, they were up in the air and didn't touch the slide.- the screw threads are minimal and the receiving plastic thickness ("business end") for holding the unit together is thin. I ended up using contact cement glue on the threads to get them to hold. I guess it's not meant to be repaired.Now, all that said, it produces great scans, at a FRACTION of the price of other products.The operating modes/parameters are funky but workable. Some trial-and-error helps one find the right combination of settings.I would buy it again, and even go thru the modifications.I'm surprised that the original designer didn't test it in actual practice to discover especially the protruding corner that is in the direct path of sliding the slide into position. (if the slide is not snug to the "bottom" edge of the 2 1/8" trough "width" (slides are 2x2"), it can easily creep "upwards" toward that protrusion and not want to slide into the scanning position).