I came across this little beauty on Ebay the other day and decided to buy it. I have never had a film scanner and at £12 this seemed to be a steal. Marketed as the Agfa Digital Converter, this item is aimed at those with a drawer full of slides and negatives in need of conversion.
The first thing you need to know about this item is that it is not manufactured by Agfa - its a generic made-in-China film scanner sold in the early to mid noughties and marketed under a variety of names - Agfa, Ion, SVP, Innovative Technology, EU3C, Otek and Plexgear to name a few. It is also known by the various brand names as the FilmScan 35i or by the boring model number SCND502E1231.
The one thing these companies have in common is a complete disinterest in providing legacy support for their scanner. If you have lost the disc it came with and are running something more up-to-date than Windows XP Service Pack 2, you are pretty much screwed. I trawled the internet for a fortnight finding a driver for this thing. Windows 7 did its best to find a driver (which was useless) and others failed.
I was about to give up when I chanced upon a driver for this which actually works in Windows 7. If by some way you are reading this because you are looking to get this thing working on Windows 7 then I am about to make your dreams come true. Firstly, get rid of any previous attempts to load a driver and make sure the scanner is unplugged. Next, download this little beauty 3.
Run the installer 4. REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER 5. Stanley ka dabba full movie with english subtitles. The installer should have created a shortcut on your desktop - Image Scan Tool 6.
Right click on the icon, choose properties, choose compatibility, and then choose 'run this program in compatibility mode for Windows Service Pack 2' Make sure the box is checked. Connect your scanner and click on the icon. You should now (pray) have a working FilmScan35i on Windows 7. You will know its working because there will be light in the negative carrier slot.
With that, I had a working scanner. I had to wait until daybreak to venture into the spider-kingdom which is my garage to find some slides. Following the fairly simple user-interface I managed to capture this slide in glorious digi-vision for eternity. This, if you are not aware, is the prototype Concorde taking a test flight.
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Date Unknown, Unbranded E6 Process, Photographer - Herbert Chester OK, maybe I should have invested in a can of compressed air. The scanner does come with a velveteen brush which is good for getting hairs out of the scanner but hey - nothing moves dust like a blast of air from a can.
The good thing about this scanner is the speed in which you can get stuff done. Once you are in the rhythm you can digitise quite quickly. Not bad for £12 on Ebay! The bad points - there is absolutely no adjustment. You can do 1800 or 3600dpi, and thats it.
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The scanner automatically adjusts the exposure - in some cases quite badly, obliterating skies and skin tones in the process. You can 'cheat' the scanner by pressing 'scan' as it is adjusting. But its not ideal. The whites can be a bit pixellated and blown out. If you need control you really need to fork out for something golden like a Nikon Coolscan. Am I expecting too much from a £10 scanner?
Budget alternatives include the Lomography scanner for smartphones which uses the same technology, this may or may not have adjustment but will certainly have full frame capture if I know anything about these hipster moneygrabbers. Alternatively you can get an LCD monitor to display white light, tape your slides or negs onto it and snap away with a digital camera. Finally a backlit flatbed scanner will certainly scan slides and negatives and many come with slide and negative carriers.
Final verdict - bargain. But if you want perfection you will need to pay more. No matter, I'm off to find some more negatives to scan. Now where did I put that spider-repellent? Sean Chester - At my kitchen table. Am running Windows 7Pro. Found one of these 'Innovative Technology FilmScan35I units on the electronics shelf for $2.92.
Found this post of yours. And EVERYTHING WORKS PERFECTLY! The unit was missing the slide 'slider' and merely placing the slide in the slot, manuevering it with a wooden ruler, centered in on the light pad, but the image was a tad out of focus. I attributed this to the millimeter or so the 'slider' would have spaced the slide closer to the lens. I was able to make a 2.5' x 6' 'slider out of cardstock, and the result is AMAZING! Many thanks for your detailed instructions.
I too have a spider kingdom in the basement with slide trays posing as stacked condos for our 8 legged friends, and I must now find MY repellent as well!
VueScan is compatible with the Microtek FilmScan 35 on Windows x86, Windows x64 and Mac OS X. You need to install the driver to use this scanner on Windows x86, Windows x64 and Mac OS X. This scanner isn't supported on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and later, since CyberViewX uses a PowerPC plugin for this scanner and Rosetta isn't available with 10.7 and later. On Mac OS X prior to 10.7, you need to use the x32 version of VueScan 9.0.96 with Rosetta. To do this:. Click on the VueScan icon while holding the Control key.
Choose 'Get Info'. Check 'Open using Rosetta'.
Now don't look for me to be writing many Tech Tuesday posts. I'm not technologically sound.I'm not completely clueless either, but as for why things work the way they do.well, I'm not your girl. 'Thingie' and 'Whatchamacallit' are technical terms in my book. What I can do is review something from an everyday user point of view. Now I've noticed that Dick Eastman has had a couple posts about negative/slide scanners recently.
That's not why I decided to do this post. I actually am reviewing this because my friend Jen of had talked about these types of scanners and wanting one. I gave her my quick 2 cents and promised a review when time allowed.
It does so here goes. A year or so ago I finally got my negatives into archival sleeves and in binders (labeled by location of course!) and thought it was time to sit down and start scanning them. Sadly, I believed that my all-in-one printer could do this and found out quickly that I was mistaken.
The printers I looked into that could handle negatives and slides were waymore than I wanted to pay. I started searching online and came across a number of them on Amazon.com. What I saw were negative/slide converters that were either several hundred dollars or less than $100. Nothing really in between.
Innovative Technology Filmscan 35 I Software Download
I went with the FilmScan 35 I by Innovative Technology. Most of the complaints at the time had to do with it taking so long rather than the quality and effectiveness of the converter itself, so I decided to give it a go. I must start by saying that my laptop had been running Windows Vista.
The converter was compatible with Vista, but is anything really compatible with Vista? Vampire diaries season 1 with english subtitles. The converter didn't work right off the bat and I had to reintall the software a few times before I got it running, but it would crash. Sometimes it would work for one picture and sometimes it would work for an hour or more, but inevitably it would crash and burn. I tried everything, removing the USB plug and putting it in another port, reinstalling the software/drivers/etc, closing it down and walking away, yelling at it, voodoo, etc. Nothing worked. I could never tell if I was going to have a good day with it or a bad day.
I put it away for quite some time and decided that today was the day I was going to bring it out and see how it ran on Windows 7. My laptop is no longer recognizing it's disk drive (time for the hubby to get friendly with my computer again) so I installed the converter on one of his laptops. It took a little bit of time (not knowing whether to do the x82/32-bit or x64/64-bit installation, I apparently chose the wrong one and it failed to work until I did the 64-bit installation) and a lot of swearing, but I got it to work. It didn't freeze and it worked beautifully. Well, as beautifully as a $65 converter can be expected to work. So, how did it work? That really depends on your negatives.
Some of mine were getting quite discolored. This scanner will do the job of converting them when you get it working, but it's not going to fix your negatives. You need photo editing software for that and be warned this converter comes with no photo editing software. But what do you expect for $65? The converter isn't super fast, but it's not awful. You've got to wait a few seconds for the negative to adjust. Once the image stops making subtle changes you can push the copy button on the top of the converter and capture the image.
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It took me about 2 hours to convert 160 images. I've got thousands to go, and I still have to fix the color on the majority of the converted photos, but I've converted them and that's better than they were before! As you can see from the picture above, the program really isn't that complex.
You won't get lost using it, which is good, because the instruction booklet that came with the converter was 2x3-inches and 6 pages long. I'm not joking.it was a tiny thing. There is a quick-start guide and an instruction manual on the disk that comes with the converter, but it doesn't get extremely detailed. It could be better. Now as for customer support. There was NO contact information with the packaging or in the instructions booklets. I had to go searching for a way to contact Innovative Technology online when I was having problems with the converter back in May 2009.
I emailed twice in a 6 week period and got the computer-generated response that my email was important to them and that I would be contacted shortly. Well, that never happened. In my 2nd email I even told them that I was preparing to review their product on Amazon.com and would appreciate a response so I could give a better review.
I've seen more current reviews saying how brilliant customer service was. Maybe they fixed their customer service issues. Bottom line.the converter is on the slow side, but it works and it's cheap. It's cheaper than paying someone to do it for you, but you'll be investing a lot of time in the conversion process. I think it's worth it in the end. I gave it 3-stars when I rated in a year ago. With Windows 7, I'll bump that up to 4-stars.
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Now I just have to get smart on my photo editing software so I can fix the colors!
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