KODAK SCANZA Digital Film & Slide Scanner (Renewed)

I inherited a lot of old family slides from my mother, and I wanted to transfer them to digital without costing an arm and a leg. This product works well, and is easy to use. The picture quality is not bad considering the slides have faded, and is not the fault of the product. The only downside is you have to manually remove and place each slide in the appropriate tray, and then insert into the viewer. It can take awhile to transfer the photos to the scan card, but again, based on the price, it is much better than paying someone else to transfer.

This scanner does a decent job for a nonprofessional scanner. I have attached what I consider a good quality 35mm negative scan and a good quality 35mm color slide scan. (NOTE: I could not view the pictures bigger than a small window on a computer, but could make them full screen and even zoom in using the Amazon iPad app). The Oregon barn picture was the color slide shot with a Nikon FE. The Death Valley picture was color negative film shot with a Canon sure shot. And these are after applying various corrections in a picture processing program, so what you see is the best I can do. If you are good with PhotoShop or similar, you might be able to get the color more spot on.You will notice the scanned pictures are not as sharp as digital pictures, but the sharpness is better than what I got projecting 35mm slides on a screen with a Kodak slide projector and taking a picture of them with a Nikon Coolpix 14MP digital camera. I also got similar picture quality scanning a 4x6 print (on my Canon scanner) as I did scanning the negative it came from on the Scanza.I don't have a good enough magnifier to know whether additional resolution exists on the film. I have read that 35mm low ASA film has a resolution as high as 24 MP, but I am not seeing it. The scanner has two resolution settings, 14MP and 22MP. The higher setting gives me larger file sizes (.jpg) but no visible improvement in picture quality, so I just use the low setting.For another point of comparison, I scanned some negatives that when processed came with a Kodak picture CD… Do you remember those? The picture CD images were very good quality, the scans close but not quite as good. I will attribute the reduced color quality of the scans to the film color degrading in the 20 years since I got the picture CD.The main challenge with scanning old pictures (I stopped using film 20 years ago) is that film degrades over time and the color is often bad. It is best to use the Scanza's RED/BLUE/GREEN correction only if the picture color is way off and be conservative with those adjustments. The scanner's built-in controls are fairly easy to use, and if in doubt, I take several scans of the film with different settings. If the picture is VERY blue or purple, I typically reduce the blue and red color components by one or two clicks (out of three possible). It is best to do most of the color correcting on the computer, and even then you often can't get them perfect, and I don't think that is the scanner's fault. I have seen a wide range between good color and bad color. And count yourself blessed if you used a lot of Kodachrome slide film, it is one of the more stable films over time. Kodachrome slides that looked good when held up to the light scanned with good color on the Scanza. Of course you can't see the color quality when holding up an old negative.The scanner is pretty easy for scanning large numbers of pictures; just push them in the right side until they are properly framed and press the Capture button, and when you push in more, the scanned ones are pushed out the left side. Some difficulty when film negatives are shorter than 4 pictures, but I can usually push them through using a piece of "fat" or folded film. Easiest workflow is to plug in an SD card and scan to it. I did not try a USB connection to a computer.You want to carefully clean both sides of the film using a soft brush before pushing it in and even after doing that, will need to retouch the pictures some in your photo software. Dust and hair are particularly bad on film negatives, where they show up as bright white marks on the picture.I did try plugging the scanner into a 4K TV using the provided HDMI cable, but the picture on the TV was very low quality, poorly cropped and not fixable. It was nothing like HD resolution, so I ended up using the built-in screen and did not try to use an external monitor again. That being said, the captured pictures are HD resolution, projecting them on that same HD monitor yields great results.I'm sure I could do better with a professional-grade scanner, but the price would jump dramatically and then it would probably be more cost effective to send them to a lab, and that is not cheap either. IMHO, digital pictures have spoiled us, and without Hollywood's equipment, our old film is unlikely to look as good.UPDATE — 110 FILMDo you remember the Kodak Instamatic cameras? The "regular" Instamatic used size 126 film and the compact one (about the size of a long pack of cigarettes) used 110 film. Yes this scanner takes 126 and 110 size film using adapters that you put inside of the 35mm film carrier.When going through my family photos I found some 110-size film. This is tiny 10mm film, so don't expect good picture quality. The scanner is not really optimized for this film but it works. The film binds when you push it into the adapter so you have to open it up and carefully feed in each new strip of film. In addition, the alignment is off, it cuts off a little of the bottom of each picture. I got better results scanning the film upside down and then flipping it electronically, either in the Scanza or in my photo software. If there is a lot of 110 film in your mix, I suggest looking for another scanner, if you can find one, that handles this size better.

The lower cost of the renewed used item is what pushed me over the edge on this product. Knowing what I know now after having used if for about a month and several thousand negatives later, I would have gladly paid full price. This has made digitizing a daunting number of pictures so fast (relatively) and in pretty good quality. None of them are going in museums or anything like that, but now I have family pictures going back to the 70's backed up. Worth every penny.

I am happy with my Digital Film Scanner. I have used it only for slides, but they were very clear. I was pleased with the quality of the scan. It appears that it would take a long time to scan the slides, but I had a large stack and they scanned fairly quickly. Very happy with my purchase.

I purchased this scanner after reading the earlier reviews and checking others available. I was really looking for something inexpensive that could scan old family slides. Inasmuch as many of the slides themselves were not of the best quality, I wasn't so concerned with the results from the scanner, I just want to preserve the images. Well, I was disappointed when the first unit arrived because it was clearly a re-furbished unit and wouldn't save images to the SD card. I requested a return and replacement and received the replacement, a brand new unit the next day! The results from the new unit have met all my expectations. The screen is adequate for previewing the images and the process is pretty simple. The color and brightness adjustments could be a little better but overall it seemed to work fine IF the original image is a good one. I did get the best results from old Kodachrome film. The Ektachrome colors were not as well preserved and tended toward the bluish side. This was always a problem for Ektachrome anyway. One annoying drawback is that the unit will not record the entire image for the "full frame" Ektachrome slides. SO if you've got a bunch of those you need to look at another unit. All in all, I would say that for the money, and if you're processing primarily 35mm or smaller film the Kodak Scanza will meet your needs.

I found the equipment to be a waste of time and money. I cannot believe Nikon put its name on it. 1. The finished scans were mediocre, at best. 2. The slides got stuck in the slide tray every two or three slides, which meant talking the tray out, disentangling the slides, and putting the tray back in again. 3. Worst of all, the AC cable connection on the back of the scanner came loose inside the scanner body. Without a good connection, the equipment would not turn on, so I now have a hundred or more slides still to scan. I am totally frustrated and disappointed that I was not able to complete this project.,