Seeing as no one else seems to know about these very compact Qpix FS-170 film and slide scanners I went back to OfficeWorks Freo this morning and discovered they gone on sale at $129. I bought one and quickly have found it to be a terrific 35mm slide copier. Maybe less than half a second to scan a colour slide.
There's a strong slide holder which comes with the scanner. It can be lined up easily on the colour preview screen. There is also a holder for 35mm negatives. The images are stored on a user-supplied SD card. I simply borrowed a card from my camera. Later I uploaded the scanned images via the camera to iPhoto. The test images so far are excellent. The scanner can run on four user-supplied AAA batteries which they reckon provide about 90 minutes use. Alternatively they supply a USB cable which can draw power from a computer or the AC power supply, which is also provided. There is also a special brush/wiper for cleaning the optics inside the device. The scanner is one of the niftiest gadgets I've seen for a long time. A sophisticated, precision bit of stand-alone gear. I suggest if anyone has slides to copy then this is going to be the ant's pants. At least I think so. At $129 I think they'll go out the door pretty quickly once the word gets around. Be warned, the instruction book takes a little study to figure all the options out. I'm still working on it. Cheers, Paul. :) Dr Paul R. Weaver http://fremantlebiz.livejournal.com/calendar -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
