From this weekends visit with friends I brought back slides to try out in my new VuPoint slide scanner that I had mentioned previously on April 26, 2008. I had only tested it out with negatives and it seemed to work relatively well.
From yesterday’s messing around I did find a few things that could be a bit bothersome. The slide scanner can be a bit slow in resetting itself. The instructions say to wait 5 seconds in between each capture. Once loading the scanner, at first I was waiting for the slide to completely load and the image to stop changing. This was creating some very bleached out images. I looked for a place to adjust the setting and didn’t find one, I even searched through the small amount of documentation that was included. When I looked closer at the preview image that appears on the screen as it is being scanned, I realized that it was giving me different exposures to choose from. I ended up rescanning some images that I thought weren’t going to display anything at all. Occasionally you had to be quick about capturing the correct exposure or you would end up with a washed out version.
The slide holder holds 3 separate slides. I found if the slides were at opposite ends of the exposure scale the scanner would do well on one and bleach the other out. I tried two different methods to correct this problem. One is to place only two slides in the holder leaving the middle one empty to give the scanner a chance to readjust and the other was to empty the scanner completely and only do one slide at a time, giving the scanner plenty of time to readjust its settings.
Some were a bit tricky and I had to load them into the scanner several times to get the correct exposure. Overall with the learning curve I scanned in over 100 slides in about 5 hours. This included taking the slides out of their metal cases, another bit of a hassle, but would have needed done regardless of the scanner I had purchased.