Ion 35mm Photo Negative and Slide Converter to PC (SLIDES2PC)
by Ion
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Category: Digital Camera
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: IonAudio: English (Original Language)
Published: 2009-09-01
Release Date: 2009-09-01
Platform: Windows XP
Model: SLIDES2PC
Color: 90 Days
Product features:
- Tranfers 35mm negatives and slides to PC or notebook quickly and easily
- Print, edit or archive photo collection with quick and easy scanning software
- 5MP hi-res full-color scanning with 1-touch instant scan
- Fixed focus range and auto exposure/color balance with high-quality 4 glass optical element
- Includes USB connection and software
- Does not currently support MAC computers.
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Ion 35mm Photo Negative and Slide Converter to PC (SLIDES2PC)
Customer Review: You get what you pay for
Summary: 3 Stars
For Christmas this year I decided to scan my parents' old wedding slides in order to make some physical prints. I had to wade through 400+ sides to find the right ones, so all I needed was a way to scan them into digital photos. Enter Ion Slides 2 PC. Disclamer: I didn't buy this product, but I did use it scan the slides. A friend had purchased one for his dad, and he let me borrow it to try it out and see if it was worth giving to his father.
I had read the reviews here on Amazon and was prepared for it to be a real nightmare. One of the big issues that had been raised to the inability to adjust brightness and to white color balance the scans. This issue has been addressed in later updates to the product software. There is now a software feature that permits the user to override the auto-exposure and tweek the colors. However, the addition of the adjustment feature is implemented in a clumsy fashion, and creates a lot of additional work for the user if they use that feature often (something I found to almost always be a necessity).
Setup is easy. Just install the driver and software, then plug in the scanner, load the slide and you are ready to roll. There are some slightly confusing features, like image format (JPEG or TIFF) and resolution (1800 or 3600 DPI) as well as 24 or 48 bit color. Some folks talked about using the TIFF files in order to help them when editing/improving the photos in Photoshop. I had the best success using JPG [highest quality], 24 bit color and 3600 DPI. Some would probably say that TIF would give you a better file to work with, but that is only true to the tiniest extent.
I ran a series of tests in attempts to determine the best image result. From my eye, it seems the scanner doesn't produce a pure bitmap image (ala TIF), so if you choose TIF you are simply getting what appears to be a transcoded JPEG. Perhaps I am wrong, and the banding and color artifacts in the base image are simply the product of the image sensor, but, to my eye, it seems like any of the TIF files I got from the scanner were nearly identical to a JPG at 3600 DPI. Which brings me to another conclusion, that the scanner doesn't actually scan at 3600 DPI, but simply upres a lower quality image by multiplying pixels. If you compare a TIF at 1800 and 3600 DPI, there is virtually no difference in the quality of the image.
The reason I used JPG at 3600 DPI is that it seems to perform the JPEG compression after the file is upres'ed thus giving me a much smaller file than a TIF without the JPEG artifacting introduced at lower resolutions. A JPG file at 1800 dpi is noticeably worse than the same scan at 3600dpi. JPG files at 3600dpi are nearly identical to TIF at 1800 (which is identical to a TIF at 3600, which has more pixels, but no additional image quality).
Forget all together using 48 bit color depth, it is only available in TIF, and from what I can tell, it adds no additional value to the scan. If you need the additional color depth, add it in Photoshop. I think the color depth is just one more up-res feature and isn't providing any actual bit depth color to the image.
Once I figured out the best format to use, I set to work scanning, something that seemed much slower than it should have been. Immediately, I knew why so many people originally complained about this product. In almost all of my photos, the images were overexposed. Many of the photos were wedding photos and both the bride and the groom were wearing white-- something the scanner had a great trouble with. The dress and jacket were almost aways so blown out that I would have considered the image unusable. If Ion hadn't added the ability to tweak the exposure, I would have torn my hair out and sent the product packing. I'm happy that is no longer the case.
As I started tweaking exposure I discovered the main weakness in the product-- the lack of dynamic rage in the sensor. This is not a new problem, this is the case with just about every cheap digital camera on the market. To get a camera with a quality dynamic range, you are going to spend hundreds of dollars (if not thousands). Being that this product is under $100, you can be assured that the "5 megapixel" sensor is not the top of the line (or any where close to it). This is where you get what you pay for.
If your slides/negatives contain well balanced images the with the majority of the image containing mid-tones, this scanner will probably work beautifully for you. If your negatives are under/over exposed or contain areas of white or black, you are going to fight with getting a good image. Almost always, I had to err on the side of under exposure. To keep details in the whites, I had to adjust exposure beginning around -4 and floating between that and -8. In some cases, I adjusted the exposure to get all of the light detail and captured it, then re-exposed for the dark or mid-range and captured again, so I had material to work with in Photoshop if I needed to work on some of the more important photos.
I also found that images tended toward the blue side of white, so I mostly had a color correction on photos that warmed them into the yellows floating somewhere around 160-180 (with 128 being the software default). If you plan on working with your scans in Photoshop, don't worry about the color or white balance, just fix it later, focus on getting the best exposure. The scanner's sensors fall apart in the whites and blacks, so, if you see large areas of white or black, don't assume that capturing to TIF is going to let you pull detail out in Photoshop, the dynamic range is so bad that even if it isn't JPEG, you are still going to deal with color banding in the shadows and highlights.
Once the photos are captured on the scanner, they have to be "transferred" to the computer, something that takes a crazy amount of time, in most cases it was 1 minute for a JPG file and several minutes for a TIF. I have no idea why the transfer takes this long, I assume it is all the software magic that a digital photo is going through to make you think you are getting a 1800 or 3200 DPI scan.
If your photos are underexposed, it doesn't appear that the light source is increased to expose it better, so as best as I can tell, the gain is boosted to the sensor which introduces noise to the image... something the the software it probably trying to "fix" while it makes you think it is "transferring".
My biggest wish is that I could just simply get the raw "scan" file without all of the processing added in. The speed added by that would make this product much better in my book.
Overall, the product is useful. The device itself is simple to use, but the software is slow, buggy and poorly designed, resulting in an often frustrating experience. If the images you are starting with are of good quality and well/evenly exposed, then this product might be something you have a good experience with. If you are not technical, not prone to "play" with something in order to figure out how to get the most out of it, or a product of the "it should just work like I expect it to" generation, then steer clear.
Be warned though, when it comes to slide scanning, the only product that is simple, easy to use, and produces a good image every time, is a scanning service. A quality scanning service uses high quality drum scanners to scan your slides. Much like this compact simple device, with them, you will get what you pay for. For most people who want something other than a box of slides they can't easily look at or share, this little product works as good (or bad) as most of them.
I hope my input helps you with you decision.
FYI, I used this product on Windows XP Professional, running on a 6 year old Compaq Presario laptop. Some of the performance issues I had might have been related to my ancient machine, but since this device doesn't run on my Macbook, I had to dig my old PC out of the closet.
Description of Ion 35mm Photo Negative and Slide Converter to PC (SLIDES2PC)
Ion 35mm photo negative and slide converter to PC. Transfers 35mm negatives to PC or notebook quickly and easily. Print, edit or archive photo collection with quick and easy scanning software. 5MP Hi-res full-color scanning with 1-touch instant scan. USB 2.0 connection and USB 2.0 port. Fixed focus range and auto exposure/color balance with high-quality 4 glass optical element. Includes USB connection and software.Digital Cameras & Photo Categories
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