PictoScanner Film and Slide Scanner – Use Your High-Resolution Smartphone to Scan 35mm Slides and Film Negatives. Easily Scan, Edit, and Share with This No-Nonsense Solution

My parents were slide people. As a kid in the 80s/90s, I can still recall the ritual – family or friends would come over, and we'd gather around a living room wall as they narrated snippets of projected life. Laughter, food, and stories punctuated by the satisfying "click" of a carousel progressing in a dimmed room.Time passed, and the carousels were stacked in the basement. The boxes continued to collect dust when, seven years ago, my mother died. She left behind a few meticulously arranged books of print photos, but a lot of our early history is still embedded in those yellow Kodak boxes.Thing is, grief makes you greedy for memory – you want to possess all of the moments, to be able to see what you missed the first time around. I have only the vaguest idea of how to work a projector, and no idea where to find it. My dad bought a cable-based slide scanner a few years ago, but the process was time-consuming and the image output poor.So we decided to try again with the PictoScanner. My dad came over with test slides and we set up everything in a few minutes. Using both of our phones, we processed a few images to start, and all were excellent. Here's the rundown:Getting StartedThis is all covered pretty well elsewhere, but can reiterate getting started was easy. What you receive is a compact device, self-contained in a box. It comes with a one-page guide, which explains how to install batteries (two AA, not included) and assemble.Next up is installing the free app on a smartphone. The guide includes QR codes to download the app directly from iTunes or Google Play. I missed this, and just searched "pictoscanner" to get going.ScanningAfter installing the app, you select the media type set to be scanned (i.e. color or b/w negative, color positive). Next step is to turn on the LED backlight on the box itself. Take a slide or negative, place it in the compartment above the light, and use your phone to scan. The app takes care of autofocusing.To compare quality, I ran the same slides through both Android and iOS devices. For once, my old Samsung compared favorably to my dad's newer iPhone – there weren't any appreciable differences in raw quality across devices, despite the difference in capability. Below are unedited examples.Image editingOnce a slide has been scanned, the PictoScanner app provides a few options for post-processing or image editing. Toolset includes:- Enhance tool (pre-set settings to adjust saturation/contrast; includes hi-def, scenery, food, portrait, and night)- Effects filters (12 filters to adjust RGB values on scans, a la Instagram)- Adjust (tools to manually correct brightness, contrast, exposure, warmth, saturation, shadows, highlights, vibrance, tint, or fade)- Crop tool (select dimensions or use pre-set aspect ratios; can double click icons to toggle between portrait and landscape)- Orientation (flip or rotate)- Sharpness (manually select)- Blemish tool (with five different "brush" sizes)- Focus (radial or linear)- Blur (six sizes, select and blur backgrounds by hand)- Vignette tool (vertical scrollbar to choose light or dark fade to edge)- Red-eye removal tool (six sizes for tool, use to manually zap out red eyes)The options are intuitive, but it took me a few minutes to perfect before saving. The app is apparently channeling Adobe's creative suite, so overall it was much faster to do everything on the phone that it was to transfer to a desktop for essentially the same result.SavingThe app gives you the option of saving to the phone or sharing immediately (sms, email, social, etc). Output files of processed color slides from my device came in at 1549x1954 pixels. Didn’t try negatives, but probably will soon.Overall, this was a terrific purchase. The scans were crisp, retouching easy, and the process fast. The only downside would be the time it takes to retouch images borne of imperfect slides, but this would be the case with any device. Incidentally, my dad took the scanner with him after we were done – I'll get myself another and hopefully we'll have everything in our family archive digitized soon.

The idea for this product is great -- use your phone to digitize old slides. The product is well designed, solid, and easy to use.The problem with this product is also what makes it a great concept -- the reliance on your phone to take a picture of a slide. I am using an iPhone 7, which has an excellent 12MP camera (many slide scanners are 10MP or less). However when the phone is placed on the top, and the camera app open, the slide is not zoomed in. It's just a tiny photo in a much wider shot. The only way to get the slide to fill the screen is by zooming in or using a camera app that has a Macro feature. The problem here is that, like many smart phones, the iPhone 7 does not have an optical zoom (the 7 Plus does, but the dual width camera is probably too big to fit the hole). So zooming in reduces quality. And don't expect the PictoScanner app to have a macro feature -- it's just a basic photo app that provides no benefit over the built in camera. The picture quality of the photo is fine if you leave it zoomed out and crop it, but having to go in and crop every photo is tedious. And no, the PictoScanner app doesn't automatically crop it for you (but has manual crop).

My wife and I had some old negatives and slides we wanted to digitize. There are a LOT of scanner options; it's a bit mind-boggling to select one, but we ended up going for this one because of the price and apparent ease of use. Using our smartphones seemed compelling, up-to-date, and somewhat logical.Pros (so far):- Intuitive - I didn't really even need the quick set up.- The free PictoScanner app (we're on Android) uses the Adobe creative cloud editor software with a pretty rich toolset, for instant adjustments.- We were scanning within a few minutes; there are no cables and minimal instructions. Really easy and simple.- Smartphones take pictures better than the cameras that took the originals; the scan quality is great.- Saving/sharing pics is simple from the App -- no need to mess with memory cards or cables. You can even text them to folks as you scan!- Works with both Android phones and iPhones (my wife's got an iPhone).- Price.Cons so far:- A little time consuming to scan slides/negatives yourself -- but that would be true with any similar device.Overall, a great investment.

Um alte Dias zu digitalisieren, braucht man kein Smartphone.Ich habe das Basisgerät ohne den Aufbau für's Smartphone senkrecht gestellt und die Dias dann mit meiner Panasonic G9 und dem hochwertigen Leica-Makro ( 90 mm KB ) mit Auslöseverzögerung fotografiert. So kann man sich auch längere Belichtungszeiten bei verbesserter Tiefenschärfe erlauben. Geht hervorragend und schneller als mit einem Diascanner ! Und ist viel billiger.

Contrairement à ce que j'ai lu, le produit est très propre, très bien fini, pas une chinoiserie, dans le sens où c'est très rigoureux. Monté en 30 secondes. Le code QR est invalide mais l'AppleStore propose l'application gratuite. Simple, rapide, efficace, mais ... moche. L'Iphone 7, très bon en photo, perd les pédales avec cette surface lumineuse en macro. La mise au point est impraticable, et pour cause : on parle de quelques dixièmes de millimètres, qui font toute la différence (le négatif n'est jamais réellement plat, forcément...). Fort heureusement j'ai un Sony Alpha 6000 qui m'a sauvé, mais là, on rentre dans le domaine des amateurs éclairés : objectif macro russe (Industar) monté sur bague allonge Meike 10MM. Diaphragme à 22 pour une profondeur de champ idéale, histoire d'être net dans tous les cas. Pose longue, donc avec retardateur et appareil posé en équilibre sur le machin. Post traitement : XNconvert et Aperçu. Là, les photos sont sublimes. Mais c'est abordable pour qui, franchement ? Moi, ça me plaît, c'est vrai. Pour jouer à visionner des diapos ou des négatifs, c'est OK. Pour archiver ou faire des tirages, passez votre chemin si vous n'avez qu'un smartphone, même excellent (je n'ose pas imaginer les smartphone basiques... ça doit être infâme..). Bon, 40 euros pour un passe-vues rétro-éclairé, j'aurais pu trouver moins cher, peut-être... Mais la revue "Chasseur d'image" qui en fait la pub mériterait un petit rappel à l'ordre...

from this device you will not get perfection but not far from it. with a bit of help from photoscape old negs can be brought back to life.

Over priced card board box with a bulb .

Die Produktidee geht auf die einleuchtende Überlegung zurück, dass man zum Digitalisieren analoger Vorlagen einen guten Digitalsensor braucht und den hat ja fast jeder bereits in Form einer modernen Smartphone-Kamera.Wozu also eine vermutlich weniger hochwertige zusätzliche Scanapparatur anschaffen?Aber: Abgesehen von dem Gefummele und Durchs-Loch-Zielen hakt das Ganze doch ganz erheblich an fehlenden Möglichkeiten. Insbesondere lässt sich der Zielordner für die gescannten Dateien nicht ändern (Bestätigung Mitarbeiter PictoScanner). Als Standardordner ist Interner gemeinsamer Speicher\Pictures festgelegt. Dieser Speicher ist in der Regel schon durch alle möglichen Anwendungen gut ausgelastet, z.B. durch Whatsapp Fotos und Videos. Wenn ich die gescannten Dias geordnet ablegen will, muss ich den Zielordner nicht nur frei wählen, sondern auch beliebig viele Unterordner einrichten können, sonst scanne ich in einen großen ungeordneten Topf.Dass eine große SD-Karte leer im Gerät zur Verfügung steht, nützt leider nichts - ich kann dorthin nicht speichern. Gerät geht zurück.