Negative Scanner Mac

The FSC1VP is a digital film scanner that can scan images at 5.0 Mega pixel quality. With 10 bits per color channel your images will transfer with amazing clarity. The FSC1 also features automatic color balance and exposure control to make the most of all of your 35mm film strips. Included in this package is a 35mm film strip cover and mounted slide cover.

Color: Black Brand: Vupoint Model: VUP FSC1VP Dimensions: 11.00" h x 9.00" w x 5.00" l, 1.00 pounds Scan images at 5.0 Mega pixel quality Automatic color balance and exposure control Built-in back light Scan color or monochrome film and mounted slides 2.0 USB Interface

Most helpful customer reviews 538 of 545 people found the following review helpful. Great physical design, poor software and driver... By Mark Although I'd been successfully using a Canon CanoScan LIDE 500f to scan OLD 35mm color and B&W negatives, it was slow going. Many of the negatives had curled up with the low humidity of Winter and mounting them into the 500f's slide adapter was quickly becoming a nightmare. I worked out how long it was taking me to mount and scan each negative, and took a look at my remaining workload (about 2,000 negatives and mounted 35mm slides remaining). It became clear I needed a faster solution both in terms of mounting and scanning speed. Since the 500f's slide attachment only supports film strips, the new device had to support mounted slides. Also, the new device had to be simple to operate, allowing me to get negatives and film strips mounted as quickly as possible, while also having facilities to secure srips curled from low humidity. That's when I saw the VuPoint FS-C1-VP 35mm scanner. It was cheap, simple, and appeared to do everything I needed. ------THE UNIT The VuPoint 35mm slide scanner is exactly what it appears to be, a 5 megapixel low-mid range CCD in a plastic housing. The housing contains a mini lightbox at the bottom to illuminate 35mm slides/negatives for scanning by the CCD. Simply take your slides or negatives, mount them in the included trays, and slide the trays into the scanner unit. Each tray window snaps gently into place, helping you to align slides/negatives under the CCD. The trays are VERY GOOD at holding curled negatives securely. (Extremely curled/rumpled negatives may introduce shadows into the scan. To relax the slides fully, try holding the tray over a steaming pot for about 10 seconds.) The build quality of the VuPoint scanner is quite high. Although made of plastic, it has a very nice feel (akin to a 'satin finish' cell phone) and the mounted slide and filmstrip trays appear durable and fit firmly into the unit. The unit gets power from an attached 4 foot long USB 2.0 cable, so it has an extremly small desktop footprint. The scanner is also insensitive to attitude, allowing usage virtually anywhere, from any angle (sideways on your lap, in bed, etc) making it much more likely you'll get that scanning job done. ------SCANNING I installed the scanner drivers ONLY, ignoring the image editing software that came with the unit (Photoimpression 6) and instead chose to scan directly into PhotoShop CS3. Using this method I was only able to 'dumb scan' at the highest resolution of 2592x1680. For negatives, this means you will need to invert the image after scanning and then perform color correction/level adjustment/unsharp masking/etc. Mounted slides or film stips will scan positive but will still need additional filters applied for best results. If you're scanning into CS3, create ACTIONS to handle typical slide archetypes (negative, positive, blurry negative, desaturated positive, scratched and dusty slide, etc). In practice, the scan driver shows you a low framerate preview of the image under the CCD. If you wait between 5 and 15 seconds, the light levels in the image will balance and be ready for scanning. A sequence of positives with extremely different light levels will push your waiting time towards the maximum. In extreme cases you can wait 45 seconds+ for decent balancing. To initiate a scan you either press the 'copy' button on the unit, or click the 'snapshot' icon via the scanner software driver. Snapshots are quick, but once you have a snapshot you then need to 'transfer' the image to CS3. This can take as long as 30 seconds per image. The driver holds 12 snapshots. Once this 'buffer' is full you need to transfer the snapshots to CS3. The driver grabs a decent amount of CPU while its previewing - taking 60% CPU on a 1GHz Pentium M laptop, and 40% CPU on a 2GHz P4. I'd imagine CPU usage would be around 20% on a dual core (will test this out later).