Ion Slide and Photo Film Scanner to SD Card

My initial impression was that his was a poor quality product. The instructions were some of the worst I have come across and the mains adaptor fell apart in my hands. There is therefore a question of electrical safety. I did mange to clip the adaptor together and now believe it is safe, if used with caution. After a number of trials and errors, working out how to find my way around the menu I managed to scan and save images. Comparing these with a rather old but high quality slide scanner they were of higher quality. The colours reproduced with this device were close to the original requiring little correction. I am therefore satisfied that the device performs as specified but has some questions as to the build quality.

ION Deluxe "film2sd" slide and negative scanner

I agree with the reviewer who said it's not a scanner, it is a cheap colour camera with an LED backlight.

I am not throwing away the original slides just yet.
The resolution of the scanned images is 2400 x 1600, but the picture is not pin-sharp, particularly towards the edge. I don't think the optics match the digital resolution.

It claims to be 5 megapixel scanner, but my sums says 2400x1600=3.84 Megapixel. I have never had any more pixels than this so I'm not sure how they justify the higher number.

The LED backlight works well and gives good colour rendition in my opinion. The contrast is sometimes a little higher than the original, but this often seems to happen when you copy slides. It is a dust-magnet, and although a special brush was supplied to clean it, I found a good blast of air was more effective. You can't see bits of dust on the little screen and a whole session of scanning can be ruined if there is dirt on the sky area, as it appears on every scan.

It was supplied with a power adaptor and a USB cable which is too short (1.2m), necessitating the use of an extension lead to reach a table at a convenient working height. The adaptor that came with mine seemed perfectly safe.
It scans in just a couple of seconds, and the slide holders work well. The negative holder is also good, but it has pegs to engage with the sprocket holes, and this means the frame does not always line up with the image perfectly... it probably depends on what camera was used to take the picture, and could be as much as half a sprocket hole out (2-3 mm). I may buy a spare holder and try "modifying" it with a pair of wire cutters to remove the pegs!

The scanned area is less than the image area of a standard 35mm slide. You lose about 13% of the width and 8% of the height - so I frequently find the tops of heads have been cut off or sometimes even a whole person when there is a large group photo, and certainly messes up the composition of a photo. The negative holder only traverses one way, which makes it harder to slide the holder to and fro to get the bit of picture you want in frame.

It copes well with black and white negatives, and it is nice to be able to see a positive image on the little LCD display, even if it is tiny.
The file size is just less than 1Mbyte, so you get about 1000 images on the supplied 1Gb SD card. (I haven't tried any others, but I understand it will take up to 4Gb)

The built-in software adjusts the colour balance of colour negatives automatically. I was really impressed with the colours from some ancient Agfa negatives (from the 1950's), that were a peculiar shade of green instead of the more usual orange colour. It reproduced them just as well more modent negs.

I have had one or two little "funnies" with the software, occasionally it won't display a very thin B/W negative on the screen, although it scans alright. once or twice it seems to have not picked up the edge of a frame correctly, and again once or twice it has adjusted the brightness incorrectly, but each time, pressing the button again to re-scan seems to sort it out. Once I had to turn it off and back on again when all the faces were green, and sky was stripy pink.

It is certainly quick to use. And is getting my slides and negatives into a useable form on the computer. As long as you understand its shortcomings it is a useful photographic tool. I bought mine on special offer, and think it was reasonable value for money considering how much digital camera you could buy for the price. It certainly beats selotaping slides to the window and photographing them with a camera !

I followed the quick-start instructions and obtained terrible results. I then tried working through the menus and realised that the scanner has to be set every time it is used for film type, in my case colour slides. The handbook seems remarkably vague on this. But once set, it delivered extremely good results. It is just a pity that it seems to need to be reset every time it is powered up so it is worth planning to scan a reasonable batch.