Inexpensive Slide Scanners: Are they worth even trying?

Just got a call from a potential customer. He was asking about getting his slides scanned and the quality of the scans when we are finished. He asked what we thought of the cheapo, inexpensive "slide scanners" that you see all over the place from drug stores, department stores, grocery stores, Best Buy, Walmart and even the radio show "computer goddess" Kim Komando is selling them. We told him that these inexpensive scanners are basically junk and only given a decent rating by those few reviewers that have some very low expectations of what a good scanning project can look like when done right. He said that he saw four cheapo scanners on the shelf at Best Buy and he noticed that ALL had been opened and returned. We think that says a lot. Make sure you can return these lemons.

We expect that this is the case with most of these inexpensive pieces of junk. They start off being priced around $100 or so. Then, wait a few weeks and the price drops to $79. Next thing you know the price is $39 and they are, no doubt, still making a hefty profit. They probably pay so little for these, made it China, pieces of junk that they can absorb all the returns from unhappy customer that take the trouble, and still make enough money to turn a good profit.

Before you know it, there is a "new" and better inexpensive scanner and the price starts out at around $100 again and goes through the whole process again. They are playing a game here and the consummer is the loser EVERY TIME. The insides stay the same on these lemons and and they just keep coming up with new outside enclosure cases. Same garbage inside. New case outside.

One good thing about these inexpensive slide scanners is that, at most places, you can return them. Check to see if that is so where you buy them. We would recommend that you purchase locally so that you do not have to pay for return shipping on the unit when you see for yourself what poor quality you will get from them.

Do yourself a favor and send us ten of your slides and we will do a free demo scan for you. Then take the same ten slides and see what the results will look like on these inexpensive slilde scanners. You can then join everyone else in the returns line at Best Buy.

(Kim Komando: shame on you for selling out your listeners who trust you to give them good advice and sell quality products.)

People are looking for an inexpensive solution to their slide digitization problem and get suckered in by thinking you can get good results for a cheap price. Its not going to happen. You get what you pay for in most every case. If you have very low expectations as to what your old slides will look like, then you might just be happy with low quality scans.

Lowered Expectations for Inexpensive, Do-It-Yourself Scanners

For those few who will write to us to tell us that they used these scanners and they do a good job, we say: You don't realize what a really good scan is, if you did not try our service and compare it to these low-end, low expectations scanners. If you go in with low expectations, where do you expect to end up? If you get anything at all, maybe you will be happy. Is that what you want to pass down to your grandchildren? When you could have some great scans if you let professionals do the scanning with professional machines? Do you think there might be a reason why we pay $7000 each for our scanners when we could just go and buy a bunch of these "scanning machines" for $39?