Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #206 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Veho
• Model: VFS-004 deluxe
• Released on: 2008-06-23
• Dimensions: 3.05 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Transfer your old 35mm negative film and slides onto your PC/Notebook ready for editing, archiving or printing. Simple and fast one touch scanning makes it easy to bring those old pictures back to life. Now comes with free 'me @ play' 5GB software so the moment you scan your old pictures onto your PC you can share with Family and friends. If you want to remove redeye or enhance your image in anyway then simply use the bundled Arcsoft Photoimpression software.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Avoid at all costs. This is a very poor quality plastic toy
I placed an order for the Veho VF-004 5MP Negative & Slide Scanner after reading 3 very positive reviews. I was especially attracted to the idea of converting all those old slides into JPG images that I could then view on my laptop. I now believe those reviews must have been written by someone connected to the supplier! This item is no more than a very poor quality plastic toy which does not deliver any useful images whatsoever. The images created were appalling, with the vast majority of detail being completely lost. No wonder it comes with image enhancing software! Although, of course, it did not really help because it is not possible to recreate detail that was actually lost in the scanning process. The results were so poor, I thought the unit must be defective so I organised a replacement which turned out to be equally poor. I am very surprised that Amazon have anything to do with this item, especially since the supplier fails to respond to any emails and cannot be contacted by phone because they are ex-directory. AVOID THIS ITEM AT ALL COSTS! Update - Feb 2009: I have just discovered that my HP all-in-one printer (C7180) has a facility for scanning slides / negatives and it's absolutely brilliant!!!

Pleasantly Surprised
I installed this scanner with ease on a Windows XP laptop and within an hour had two 35mm films scanned in. After a while I got into a routine, getting familiar with the loading, button pressing, transferring etc and would expect to get a 36 frame film scanned in about 15 minutes in future.

I had been apprehensive about how the scans would come out having seen the mixed reviews but I was pleasantly surprised. I would say I am fairly demanding on sharpness and colour accuracy; I am a mid-range SLR camera user rather than a snapshot photography, and I found the scans certainly good enough for displaying on the laptop screen at full size. The results at this size are on a par with viewing shots direct from my Canon SLR; zooming in reveals the scans are less sharp but this is irrelevant unless you want to crop photos down before viewing.

I would have given this scanner 5 stars if if were not for one issue; every scan has a sliver right along one edge that looks like it is scanning the edge of the film holder. This is easily removed by cropping (I use Irfan view as it is quick to use) but slightly annoying - I have yet to work out if it is a misalignment that I can correct in positioning the holders in the slot of the unit.

On balance I would say this scanner is worth having because it does the job with reasonable speed and quite acceptable quality.

I have since sent it back and got a replacement because of the edge effect on each scan. Unfortunately the new one does exactly the same thing and the edges of contrasty subjects have artifacts like a string of bright spots along the boundaries. I am not so pleased with this device now.

What it says on the tin...
Well, I hope I can resolve the clash between the lovers and haters of this item. This is a basic product for those who want to digitise a whole bunch of snaps and are not precious about the quality. If what is important to you are the memories a photo brings back and you have a whole bunch of negatives to crunch through then this is for you as long as you are happy to trade quality for speed. If not, buy the top-end Plustek with all the bells and whistles. If you have a lot of negatives to do though, you'll have to wait until you retire and have enough time to scan them all!