Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05

The Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05 ($99.99 direct) is one of those rare products that does more than you might expect. Not only does it scan both photographic prints and 35mm film, but it does the job surprisingly well. 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.

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. 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. It's this second difference that makes the PanScn05 particularly worthy of attention.

Setup and Scanning
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. Also on the back is a memory card slot and both power and USB connectors.

The scanner comes with a 1 GB MicroSD card and an adaptor for the scanner's card slot. Setup consists of plugging in the card and connecting the power cable. 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. Either way, the scanner will feed the photo, scan it, and save the scan as a JPG file. 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.

After 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. 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.

Aside from the one utility, Pandigital supplies no software and no way to change any scan settings except for 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. Film, however, always scans at the scanner's 1,200 ppi optical resolution. Note that anything over 300 ppi is overkill for prints unless you plan to enlarge them. However, the 1,200 ppi for film is a little low for printing photos at anything much larger than 4 by 6 inches.

Speed and Quality
Speed for manual-feed scanners isn't very meaningful, because it doesn't include the time you spend on the manual feed. 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. 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. Both are fast enough so they won't try your patience. 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.

More important than the speed is that the scans are high enough quality to be worth having. 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). 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.

Other Issues
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. In fact, the two scanners are virtually identical, except that the Pandigital version is white and the Kodak version is black. The main difference between the two is that the Kodak version comes with Kodak EasyShare software, which lets you manage your photos as well as turn them into photo mugs, photo books, and other products you can buy from the Kodak Gallery Web site.

Given that you can download the software from Kodak's site for free, this isn't enough of a difference to matter. Somewhat more important is that the Kodak version comes with a 2GB memory card instead of 1GB. Keep that in mind when you compare prices between the two models.

The only complaint I have with the PanScn05 is that the film adaptor is small enough to make it easy to lose. That's particularly troublesome when you consider that the best argument for getting the scanner is to give you an easy way to scan negatives. However, Pandigital says that if you lose the adaptor, you can get a new one for free, and without a shipping and handling charge, simply by calling and asking for it.

Note too that if you want to scan slides, they can't be mounted, which means that if they're in cardboard holders now, you have to carefully tear off the cardboard. Depending on how many slides you have, this could be a daunting task. And, of course, if you want to use the film as slides again, you'll have to remount them.

Fortunately, these issues are more in the realm of minor cautions than major problems, unless your main need is scanning slides. The Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05 is a highly attractive option for casual photographers who want to scan prints, negatives, and an occasional slide easily, quickly, and without having to know anything about scanning beyond how to put the photo in the manual feed slot.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05 with several other scanners side by side.

More scanner reviews:
??? Pandigital Personal Photo & Negative Scanner/Converter PanScn05
??? Kodak P461 Personal Photo Scanner
??? Kodak P460 Personal Photo Scanner
??? Brother DS-600
??? Canon imageFormula DR-3010C
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/iruMz794qzA/0,2817,2390409,00.asp

jennifer love hewitt guy fawkes leukemia leukemia santa clara music downloads music downloads