Photomyne A4 Slide Viewer | Light Pad Backlight | Negative Viewer | Film Negatives & Old Slides Scanning Light Box | Hands-Free Ultra-Thin Ultimate Brightness (Includes USB Adapter) - Black

It works like a charm

I'm having fun digitizing my old slides.

Viewer is bright, evenly lit over most of it's surface. Arrived with the usb cable but I did not receive any adapter.

Works great to view old slides

This was perfect for me as I was given a bunch of old slides photos from my mom and this was easy to use to upload these photos into the app and enjoying viewing these photos for good memories.

We were thinking to replace our old - really old - slide viewer when we got into a slide organization mode. There are plenty of the old fashioned ones with an incandescent light bulb behind a transparent plastic screen that is held up at an angle by some sort of device. They work, but the light is always variable over the screen, it yellows with age and of course the bulb gets hot. This is an entirely different animal. It's small, light weight, is a singular screen that sits flat on any surface. The light is evenly distributed over the surface, with two levels (I almost always use the higher level) and powered by a standard USB connection. (I don't recall if a cable was included - I think it was - I have so many that's not a big deal) I just toss it on top of any handy surface and toss the slides on it. The illumination is fine to get a clear view of the transparency. I imagine it would work for film strips and negatives as well, but I haven't tried it for that.. Being able to just toss the slides on the flat screen without them needing to be carefully placed on the little rows of the old fashioned viewers is nice. Sliding them around to organize them any which way is a snap. I'm thinking of getting a second (or third) to organize more slides at once, or in different places. At this price why not. To think nothing of the energy savings and lack of heat. A cool deal.

The specs for this in its Amazon ad state the power source is "corded electric", leaving the buyer to think it has a cord to plug into an electric outlet. It doesn't. You have to connect this to your computer via USB, which can be REALLY inconvenient. If the top of your desk is already crowded with CPU, monitor, printer, keyboard, and a wi-fi router, this takes up needed space. Plus the little USB connector is so small, it's difficult to connect it to the light table.When I say this is "okay for hobbyists", that's exactly what I mean. You aren't going to get a really good print from any negative or slide you "scan" using any sort of scanning app. The company DOES say this isn't a scanning device, but they use the words "scans" and "scanning" so much, it's easy for people who don't know what real scanning is to get fooled. You're essentially making a photograph of a negative which you then have to import into some sort of image editing software to turn it into a positive that you can adjust for tonality and color. In other words, making a photo of a negative is a useless task. If you want a serious scan, you need a dedicated scanner that scans at high resolution. With this thing, you're just making a photograph of a photograph...and we all know how well that works, don't we?Really, about all this is good for (for me) is taking quick looks at negatives to decide which ones I want to work on in a program such as Photoshop or Lightroom. When I'm not using it for that, it sits on a table away from my work space. When I look at it, it reminds me I should have bought something else.

We were able to view 1,000s of family slides and negatives in this efficient way by using the slide viewer. We could then use the online Photomyne app to send pictures from the slides and negatives to family members who had never seen them before. It's been wonderful. As a result also, we could discard the slides or negatives that were not meaningful, just took the best ones that can also be uploaded to not just the phone but also to wherever pictures are backed up (ICloud or Google Photos or Amazon Photos, etc.). Love this device and highly recommend! In fact just referred the Photomyne slide viewer and app to some friends over the weekend for all of their boy scout and family slides!