Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have had this scanner about 1 week and after looking at the number of negative comments decided to put in my experience. Hardware: The physical scanner looks and feels quite solid. The "scanner" is a 5 megapixel video camera with a close focus lens and LEDs for illumination. The slide carrier and negative carrier have "locks" on the sides and in the middle that make it difficult to easily change the contents. I filed them off and much prefer it that way. In addition the slide carrier has a ridge all the way around the slide making it difficult to get a slide out after scanning. I filed away the center part of the left and right edges. I could then slide a finger nail in to lift up the slide. The carrier only moves through the copier from the right side to the left. I would have preferred a carrier that could toggle left then right so that you could fill the one side while the other side was being transferred. It turns out that the hardware takes a lot of power from the USB port. I had 1 computer that the "live image" would not work on (it only provided a partial (20%) image then streaked). A call to the company gave a quick answer that my USB port was not providing enough power. Switching computers confirmed that because it worked in the new computer. Software: There are 2 parts. The driver allows the scanner to function with any program that can take scanner input. I used it with ACDSEE, HP photo manager, ArcSoft Photo impression. I understand it could be used with Picasa but didn't try it. The driver appears to be pretty primative but functional. The "live view" is basically a video feed. When you click "snap shot" or press the copy button you freeze the image for later transfer. You can see the compensations for lighting as the live image changes. You may accumulate up to 12 images before doing a transfer. The annoying thing is that you cannot easily select multiple images. I found I had to control-click on each one. The transferred images looked good. Sometimes the color was a little off, but the detail of the slide was there. Color can be tweaked, detail can not be added to a picture. I tried it on 3 computers. All were XP SP2. One failed with a BlueScreen of Death. I tried the driver from the manufacturer website but got the same results. All in all, I think this will do exactly what I want -- scan the boxes of slides that my parents and I have accumulated over the years. I would like to have had some more options to control the lighting and contrast in the driver. The 2nd part of the software is the PhotoImpression program. It is OK. If you already have a photo catalogger/editor program you can use it to acqquire the images. You don't have to install anything but the driver from the disk. PhotoImpression was OK. All in all, worth the money.