Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this Memor-Ease 35mm film and slide scanner at Costco a few days ago, which is the good news, since they'll take it back without complaints, restocking fee, and other nonsense. I've done a lot of digitizing and scanning, in the past 20 years, photos etc., and I figured I'd try this small scanner since it was inexpensive (~$50) and the box reads that it will quickly scan at "12MB in Tiff, 24-bit color in Jpeg" and has a "5Mpxl CMOS sensor equal to 1800 dpi". Sounded pretty good for what I needed. I ran the software on Win XP with plenty of memory and hard disk real estate, and there was no lag time at all in the usage. Above reviews are correct, it is fast, the software loaded correctly the first time, and the scanning is very straightforward, and relatively quick.
The bad news: However, I couldn't get the scans of my slides to look any better than less than VGA quality, where there was lots of graininess and mosaics in the colors, the scans were all very dark which needed to be lightened on each one (adding a not insignificant amount of time to each post-process - I need to scan several hundred family and work slides), and just not the quality I'd expect from a slide scanner with the published specs, even though its just a cheap one. Faces were especially grainy, and not at all the quality of the initial slides.
Amazon has this listed for $79 which was Costco's regular price without a coupon, and for that price I'd be very unhappy. For $50 this may work for a number of people, but if you want the scans to look just like the slides you are scanning, with the same crispness and clarity, this is not the scanner to use. In deference to tech support, I can't find them with a geiger counter. I have been calling it for 3 days, the line has always been busy during various regular hour calls, so I am not able to ask the company itself if I am just not setting things up correctly. (I am pretty meticulous when it comes to following directions and reading manuals/install sheets, and I believe I have set this up all correctly.) My scans in TIFF mode were very grainy as well. I tried many different settings in JPEG mode, which is the file format I want, but the highest non-compressed JPEG mode is still way too grainy. The Adobe Elements 5.0 software which comes bundled with this worked flawlessly, but software is only as good as the scan it gets fed. I've sent an email to tech support and if they reply to me in a couple of days, and fix this problem, I'll be happy to revise this review to a more positive note. Otherwise, its back to Costco for a refund-o. Hope this helps! - Jim M.
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