Hello all!
Recently I picked up the Traveler TV6500 Film scanner from Aldi for 50euro. A good price, since the only other place I could pick it up anything similar was IWANTONEOFTHOSE.COM for £50.
So what does one get for ones 50euro?
You get the Scanner tower, with a built in 5.0 megapixel camera (up to 1800 dpi resolution).CD with a copy of Arcsoft Photo Impression 6, cleaning brush, 2 negative film holder sliders and 2 slide frame sliders.
The tower is made of matte black plastic and a metal panel on the top with the 'on' light and the scan button. The tower connects to the pc/laptop via USB 2.0 built in cable which also powers it. It feels hollow, cheap and light but as long as I don't drop it all will be good.
The sliders are made of the same matte black plastic and are sturdy.
The drivers and software are easy to install and I was up and running in about 10 to 15minutes after taking it out of the box. The software opens up and you can use it with a normal scanner also. Selecting the film scanner, I have the option to select slides, negatives or b/w negatives as well as the dpi and colour depth. I should be able to select either Jpeg or Tiff file type, however mine seems to have defaulted to Tiff. Not a huge problem except this file type tends to have huge file sizes (one picture in TIFF file was 99.5mb, when I converted it using photoshop to JPEG it went down to 7.5mb). After selecting the options a new window appears with a film reel at the top and a window to the left. The window is a live view from the camera, so you can adjust colour, saturation, brightness on the right hand side and see it live. A nice feature especially to line the photos up right. Up can take a snapshot of up to 12 photos before having to transfer it to the PC. Thats 3 negative film slides. Handy. The sliders slot in at the bottom and you push them manually to the next photo.
Transferring the photos can take time however, but this may be due to my filetype that its being saved as.
The photos are also auto adjusted to make them brighter also when they're being saved.
I like this piece of kit. Its easy to use. I also like the fact that it saves me having to scan the original photos, many of which have become damaged. I give this product a 4/5. I took 1 from it because it could do with more substance to the tower. That is all!
Thanks for reading!
