Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you're older than a certain age, then you probably have a box full of old negatives/slides for pictures from the first part of your life. And you probably have realized that while you can take the prints from those pictures and mount them in a photo book, that's really old school, daddy-O! The big problem is that you can't easily share that photo book. Sure, you can regale your friends and neighbors with your photos and tales when they have the misfortune to say something like "oh, what's in THAT book over there?" But how many "likes" can you accumulate that way? How can you get your Aunt Debbie--who you haven't seen in, like, 30 years-- to fawn over pictures of you as a young ram? The answer is that as long as your pictures remain on negatives and prints...you can't. But problem presented and now...problem solved. You need a slide scanner to convert those negatives to digital photos that you can titrate out each Throw Back Thursday from now until the cows come home. Slide scanners aren't new. But until a few years ago they were either entirely too expensive, or entirely too lousy to be of much use. Then a variety of lower priced scanners started to appear on the market. The usable low priced end of the market is represented by the Wolverine line. All slide scanners amount to the following: You put a slide in front of light source and capture the projected backlit image on a "CCD" (the same photo capture technology used in digital cameras). The key differences among these scanners are: A) How fancy and automated a mechanism is used to feed the negatives/slides; B) How pure is the light source; C) How good is the CCD detector and D) How good are automated software options at cleaning up the captured images. The Wolverine scanner here is--let's not delude ourselves--merely adequate in all these areas. But it's a situation where the sum is greater than the parts, and on the whole it's a wholly usable low cost solution to the problem. It does have its limitations, though. In particular, the low end CCD detector results in digital photos that are more than sufficient for things such as posting to Facebook or Snapchat, and probably for 4x6" prints, but aren't going to lead to satisfactory blowups at 8x10 resolution. Specifically, the digitized photos, which are captured at 5472x3648 resolution, are very noisy if you examine them at an actual pixels level. But viewed in full screen mode on a digital camera, or even on a 1920x1200 resolution monitor, they look pretty good. So know what you can expect to get here. If you need professional quality results that can be blown up, this is not the device for you--you'll need to spend 2x or more to go to the next level. Beyond the noise in the captures, I found that this unit tended to add a blue cast to many digitized photos. This was easily removed in digital editing software and once removed, the remainder of the colors were vibrant and true. Feeding the negatives is accomplished, in the common case of 135 slide negatives, by pushing the negative through a guide. Slides with some warp to them (typical of slides stored for years) sometimes took a bit of jiggling to get the slide strip to push through to the other side. Beyond that, it was trivially easy to line up each picture on a slide strip in the LCD viewer, push the two buttons required to capture the image, and to move on to the next picture. In about 2.5 hours I was able to digitize about 400 slides. Once you get the hang of it, the process is very fast. The unit comes with a very limited amount of internal memory--enough to digitize about 20 slides. The bundle posted here tosses in a low end Sandisk 32Gb external SD memory card (the largest size officially supported) that can hold about 7500 or so digitized images. If you want the photo scanner without the bundled memory card you can find it here: Wolverine Titan 8-in-1 High Resolution Film to Digital Converter with 4.3" Screen and HDMI output for less money. Adding a memory card is a must, but you can often buy the scanner and a non-bundled 32Gb SD memory card for less. The Wolverine scanner has a mode that allows you to transfer the saved pictures to your computer (PC or Mac) with a couple of button pushes. Alternative, you can take the memory card out of the Wolverine and use your favorite SD card reader. There is very little in the way of options to optimize the captured images (a few color band adjustments that I found worthless), and no editing options. Honestly, I do the editing on the PC anyway, so the lack of editing options is irrelevant. For professional work, you would definitely want access to various capture options, which are not provided here. But as noted earlier, this is nice unit for the novice. Professionals will assuredly be looking elsewhere. The Wolverine Titan comes with the digitizer, a USB cable, a USB power adapter (powers the digitizer), an assortment of various sized guides to let you capture different formats of slide/negative film, and a special brush that is used to keep the light source clean (important; you will assuredly need to periodically clean the light source or else you'll wind up with dust artifacts on your scans). The built in LCD is fine for aligning your slides before capturing them, but it's of relatively low resolution and not sufficient for any kind of detailed work. For that, you'll need to look at the slides on a PC. On the whole, I found the Wolverine Titan to be a lot of fun, and very easy to use. Is it the best slide scanner on the market? Not a chance. But the ones that are appreciably better are also appreciably more expensive. If your goal is fast and easy conversion of slides to digital photos that will be used for social media or printing at nominal size (e.g. 4x6"), then this may well be the gateway from dusty photo box to digital that you've been searching for.