PANDIGITAL SCANNER NEGATIVES TRAY MANUAL
PANDIGITAL SCANNER NEGATIVES TRAY SOFTWARE

If you go to the Pandigital Web site, you might notice that the Kodak P460 Personal Photo Scanner ($109.99 direct, 4 stars), which is also sold on the site, has similar features. However, the quality for both prints and slides should pass muster for casual photographers who aren't likely to print photos at larger than 5 by 7 inches. More serious photographers probably won't settle for 1,200 ppi resolution for slides, and, in this price range, would probably be happier with an inexpensive flatbed like the Editors' Choice Epson Perfection V300 Photo ($99.99 direct, 4 stars). More important than the speed is that the scans are high enough quality to be worth having. As a point of comparison, the Plustek SmartPhoto P60 ($90 street, 2.5 stars) took 21 seconds to scan a 4 by 6 at 300 ppi. Both are fast enough so they won't try your patience. That said, the speed came out to 10 seconds in my tests for a 4 by 6 at 300 ppi and 17 seconds for scanning one frame of film. With prints, you'll probably want to protect the originals by putting each one in the plastic sleeve that Pandigital provides, and with both prints and film you need to take the time to carefully feed the original so it goes in straight.

PANDIGITAL SCANNER NEGATIVES TRAY MANUAL

Speed for manual-feed scanners isn't very meaningful, because it doesn't include the time you spend on the manual feed. However, the 1,200 ppi for film is a little low for printing photos at anything much larger than 4 by 6 inches. Note that anything over 300 ppi is overkill for prints unless you plan to enlarge them. Film, however, always scans at the scanner's 1,200 ppi optical resolution. In addition to turning power on and off, the scanner's one button can switch between 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and 600 ppi for prints.

PANDIGITAL SCANNER NEGATIVES TRAY SOFTWARE

Still another choice, once you've installed a utility from the card, is to tell the scanner to scan directly to your hard drive when you're connected to the computer.ДЄside from the one utility, Pandigital supplies no software and no way to change any scan settings except for resolution. In the case of film, it will auto-detect whether it's positive (a slide) or negative, and it will find each frame on a strip to scan to a separate file.ДЄfter you've scanned an image to the memory card, you can move the card to your computer, or plug in the supplied USB cable, let your computer recognize the card as a drive, and then copy the files. Either way, the scanner will feed the photo, scan it, and save the scan as a JPG file. You can then turn the scanner on and either put a photo in the slot or snap in a small film guide and put film in the guide. Setup consists of plugging in the card and connecting the power cable. The scanner comes with a 1 GB MicroSD card and an adaptor for the scanner's card slot. Also on the back is a memory card slot and both power and USB connectors.

The PanScn05 is a small manual-feed scanner, just 1.7 by 6.2 by 2.7 inches (HWD) with a 4-inch-wide feed slot in the front and a straight-through path to the exit in the back. It's this second difference that makes the PanScn05 particularly worthy of attention. The key differences between the two are, first, that the PanScn05 is limited to a maximum 4- by 6-inch scan size, rather than letter size, and second, it adds film scanning, which lets it scan unmounted 35mm slides as well as strips of film.

The PanScn05 shares a number of key features with the similarly named Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner/Converter PanScn06 ($149.99 direct, 3.0 stars) that I reviewed last year. Serious photographers will want higher resolution and more control over settings, but the PanScn05 may be precisely the scanner that a casual, consumer-level photographer with boxes of photos they want to get onto their computer has been searching for. Not only does it scan both photographic prints and 35mm film, but it does the job surprisingly well. The Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05 ($99.99 direct) is one of those rare products that does more than you might expect.

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Pandigital scanner negatives tray