Scanning things isn’t exactly rocket science but if you’ve ever owned a scanner, I bet you’ve had friends and family members drop off stacks of old photos for you to “just scan real quick!”
And if you really got down to the heart of the matter, you might find that the reason regular people don’t scan their own photos is either pure laziness or the assumption that scanners are too complicated. While there’s little to no cure for laziness, complicated scanning setups are sometimes enough to deter most average users from digitizing their own photos.
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Pandigital’s $100 “Personal Photo Scanner” takes most, if not all, the complication out of photo scanning by including a built-in SD card slot. You feed a pile of photos into the scanner — which only measures 6.15″W x 1.8″H x 1.5″D and weighs half a pound — and your photos are digitized directly to the card. Simple as that.
Aside from scanning photos up to 4″ x 6″ in size, the scanner also includes attachments for scanning negatives and slides. I didn’t have any slides to test out, but I found the negative scanning feature to work really well. Each of my negatives contained four photos, which the scanner recognized and automatically cropped into four separate digital images.
Photos are scanned at 1800 x 1200 resolution at 300 dpi, which results in pretty good looking digital images. You’re not going to use this thing for professional-level photos, however. This machine is good for archiving all your old photos but don’t expect mind-blowing results by any means.
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I ran into a problem right out of the gate where there’d be a thin but prominent horizontal line located in the upper third of every scanned photo, but the scanner’s self-cleaning function took care of that right away. And it helps to use the included plastic photo protector, although if you’re feeling adventurous you can feed photos directly into the scanner, too.
All in all, Pandigital’s Personal Photo Scanner is a nice, inexpensive way to scan a bunch of old photos relatively quickly. It’s incredibly simple to use and, perhaps best of all, its tiny size makes it easy to store when you’re done.
Product Page: Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner
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