A very practical scanner

When I took up photography, I made it a point to keep all my negatives. At that time, I wanted to be able to make additional prints; which of course never happened. Later on, I started taking slides because I wanted to project them on the wall to see a bigger image. Now I simply want to digitize everything and store stem on my computer.

I have tried several different scanners, including a very good one that I borrowed from the camera club. The effort of getting as good a quality scan as possible was not really worth the trouble, as my slides and negatives were very old and generally poor in quality.

Finally, I decided to get the most practical scanner I could find. This one costs me less than Aud$65.95, inclusive of shipping. It does the job with the least effort. This scanner has a monitor, is powered by USB, and images are stored in an SD card, as you can see in the picture. To scan, simply pop the slide into the slot in front of the monitor and press the big button on the left. The image is captured within 3-4 sec. Here are some sample images from 30 years ago. The handsome young man in the truck was scanned from a slide. The very charming couple and the two adorable kids were scanned from a negative. All the images are straight out of the scanner and have not been post processed, except for size reduction.

The model of this scanner is FS186. It is an OEM product (unbranded), and you can view it here: http://www.sundah.com/fs186-slide---negative-film-scanner-248.html . Caution: the scanner hangs up after scanning 510 images. I think there is a limitation, so don't bother getting larger than 1GB SD card.