Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I looked at a lot of these little slide scanners before deciding on this one. It's about twice as expensive as most of the no-name slide and film scanners sold on Amazon. After I ran several old 35mm slides through it, the LCD screen developed an intermittent problem with horizontal streaks and noise (see video), which made me decide to return it. It also had a tendency to power itself off for no apparent reason. Even without these defects, I was not at all happy with it. The image quality is barely acceptable if you don't look too closely, but all of the images it produced had an unacceptable amount of grainy noise, like the texture of an orange peel. Some experimentation with an optical microscope and a flatbed scanner confirmed that this noise is not film grain or anything else present on the slide itself. It appears whether or not you use the interpolated 22MP setting or the standard 11MP setting. If anything, images produced at the lower setting look a little better with no discernible loss of resolution. I have attached 3 images, 1:1 details of the same slide of an old Ford Fiesta, taken in 3 different ways. The first is taken with the scanner set at 22MP, the second at 11MP, and the third is from my Epson V300 flatbed scanner at 600 DPI. Although the colors are good with the Kodak scanner, the orange-peel artifacts are not acceptable. I have a few different image editors at my disposal, but I cannot find a global filter that makes them look any better. Reducing the images in size to about 25% of the original helps a little, but the graininess is still visible, and you lose detail in the process. I purchased this device because I have a collection of over 700 old 35mm color slides that my father took between 1950 and 1978. 80% of them were taken before 1961. This is the only film record I have of my childhood, so I did not want to send these out to be commercially transferred to a digital format. My flatbed scanner only does 4 slides at a time, and it takes close to a minute to produce a good scan of each one. I need something faster. This seemed like a good solution, and it has the Kodak name. However, it appears to be similar in features to scanners that retail for $60-$80, and I suspect it's made in the same factory as the cheap models. Admittedly, I have not tried using one of those scanners, as they are rather poorly reviewed here, so I don't know if they are the same, better, or worse. There are some other problems with the device. The feature set is bare bones. There are some options for brightness and color correction, but they appear to be applied in post processing, not during the scan itself. There is no backlight correction, and the white balance looks to be off on shots with a lot of light and dark areas. The computer interface is downright boneheaded. The device will function as a card reader, but only when it is powered on and the USB upload option is selected. At that, it will not work if plugged in to a USB 3.0 port, you have to use an available 2.0 port. If you have images stored on the device's internal memory, you have to remove the SD card to see them, and the device powers itself down whenever you remove or insert it. There are no other computer controls available, e.g., the device will not function as a TWAIN source, and you cannot preview the images on your computer screen as you scan them. Some cropping takes place when the slide is centered in the scanning area. It just slices a little off the sides, but anything taken in portrait mode on the camera itself has to be scanned on its side and rotated 90° in an image editor on your computer, unless you want to crop a good deal of the picture when you scan it. The scanner has options for 180° rotation or a horizontal flip, but not for portrait orientation. I'm disappointed that this did not meet my needs. If anyone knows of a better option, I'm all ears.