Kogan 5-in-1 Combo Scanner Youtube

[Laylow Skidmore]

Iknow sheet-fed scanners risk damaging the originals unlike a flat-bed but Kogan has a different design which I am wary of for my old family snaps (super high quality not a priority but damage would be annoying).

Am looking at the $130 Kogan 5-in-1 scanner which has been around for years but little has been discussed about it on Whirlpool. The manual shows it is not a flatbed scanner but has a holder/cartridge you insert your photo/neg/slide into which in turn is inserted into the scanner. Would that design risk scratching the original?

Those Kogan type scanners aren't worth it. I've seen reviews of that type and some people have had damage occur because the print can get jammed between the holder and the case. In some instances the photo has actually fallen out of the holder and into the base of the unit, with no obvious way of getting it out again.

A flat-bed will give you MUCH better results with zero chance of damage. The photo only touches a sheet of glass and the scanner head is underneath it so there's no chance of any movable parts coming into contact with your photo.

I've used both flat bed and dedicated negative strip scanners. without a shadow off doubt the negative strips scanners have been far and away more capable. but they were significantly expensive costing things made by like of nikon and minolta. no idea on the kogan thing....

On EBay there are assorted no-name slide/negative scanners for $75 or less. If you don't want the extra features of the Kogan I suspect they do a similar job. There has a been earlier WP discussion of some of these. IIRC the results are comparable to a cheap flatbed.

I've also 'scanned' negatives to 40-50Mp with a macro lens on my M4/3 camera. This can extract quite a bit more detail, down to the individual film grains. Don't know how close the Plustek would get to this.

It seems to the cheap EBay/Kogan scanners are just a camera module and light source. They don't 'scan' at all, just take a snapshot. In theory it should be possible to get good results this way but they could be let down by poor manufacturing quality and inferior software.

The image posted by 'forty-two' on the earlier thread did not look too bad. I'd suggest it is possible to build a pretty good neg copier with a high quality camera module and light source, but I don't know how the ones available might live up to that.

as a note from someone who has done a lot of negative and positives film scanning it can be a laborious process. and flatbreads are OK have used those with cartridges vs dedicated film scanners with cartridges and the dedicated ones really bring film to life !

if have a whole one off stack to do, id approach some of he specialist stores as quite likely will have a service that will do for you at far higher quality and lesser overall cost/time than trying to do yourself. something to explore anyways....

I used a Nikon LS4000 to scan in aroundd 15,000 negatives and slides and non were damaged. Quality is excellent. I was looking at one of the Epsons to do some larger format negs but haven't ordered one yet. Probably getting the V800

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