Has anyone heard anything about this $200 scanner? The price sounds to low to be any good, but on the other hand flatbeds have come down a huge amount since competition heated up and maybe the same is becoming true of film scanners. Thanks, Larry

-- Larry Basch (lbasch@global2000.net), September 16, 1999

Answers

I had one of these for a couple of weeks. I could not get an acceptable scan. The images did not seem as sharp as they should have been - like the scanner needed focusing. This is a parallel port scanner (or mine was) and my parallel port was only capable of bi- directional. The instructions said this was ok but that ecp would be better. Also the scanner I had had been returned by someone before me, not a good sign. The driver was hard to use for me. The instructions talked about an upgrade driver at extra cost. The main reason I wanted to try it was my pleasent experience with a flatbed of the same brand. If I find one factory sealed I may try again.

-- Gene Brown (geneb@ntin.net), October 03, 1999.

I bought one of these, re-badged as a Jenoptik Jenscan 21. It was bought specifically to scan colour and B&W negs. Three days later I returned it. It was awful! Colour was way off, and varied across the frame, giving very poor results from negatives. I did try it with a few odd slides and results were barely acceptable, very de-saturated, with reds especially weak, but the sharpness on my sample was quite good though. I took some sample printouts with me when I went back to the shop, along with photographic prints from the same negs. They gave me a refund without a murmer. Thinking I might have got a bad sample, I got another shop to demo one for me. Same outcome. Highly Unreccomended, Minus 5 stars.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), November 09, 1999.

Perhaps I was just lucky (but I only do B&W). See my reply to this.

-- Alan Gibson (Alan.Gibson@technologist.com), November 09, 1999.

The scanner scans film strips good, but it is so noisy. Step motors are making incredible sounds.

-- Nader (nader.d@usa.net), December 08, 2000.