KODAKMobile Film Scanner - Fun Novelty Scanner Lets You Scan and Play with Old 35mm Films & Slides Using Your Smartphone Camera - Cardboard Platform & Eco-Friendly Toy LED Backlight

KODAK Mobile Film ScannerThis is a clever product for what it does. And at a great price. I like it for that. And what you want to use it for should be aligned with what it does.DO NOT think, however, that you are going to scan your entire negative and slide collection and turn them into photographs. While it CAN do this, it's really not for that purpose. It can do this for the odd slide or negative, no problem. But the process is a bit time consuming and depends on the quality of the picture taking capabilities of your phone - which are, no matter how new your phone is, still very limited compared to a scanner or camera. Remember, your phone is a "phone with a camera function” not a real camera. The images you take with your phone are JPGs, which can't be very well post-processed such as with RAW or TIFF images - which is an important requirement for converting negatives & slides. If you have that many slides & negatives, you really need to get either a scanner, or pay a service to do them in bulk. This is simply not the product for that kind of volume at all.You need to download the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner app for your smartphone. It’s a basic app that has “film negative, color negative, positive film” settings for your camera so it can interpret the image it sees over the film plate. It works well enough. It has a couple of filters built in for adjusting contrast and color tint, but they are hard to precisely adjust. (BTW, remember that Kodak went bankrupt years ago, so even though this has the Kodak colors and logo, it’s NOT the “Kodak” company of yore. Just some unrelated company that bought the trademark rights for “Kodak” (just like “Polaroid” today as well.).So here’s what it does do and what I bought it for. I do have hundreds of rolls of film (negatives) and this little baby can allow you to view your negatives as positives via the imaging of your phone. It makes it much easier to view the negatives and see what you’ve got. Your phone’s function also allows you to enlarge the image as well, to see details you’d miss just holding it up to the light. You could use a lightbox, which I also have, but you can’t enlarge the negatives and, importantly, you are still looking at a negative image, which can make it difficult for the untrained eye (or trained, for that matter.) So this system is much better. You put one end of the negative strip in, and pull it though, all the while seeing positive images on your phone’s screen.After that, you need to make notes and make decisions: “convert #15 and #21,” or “toss the whole strip…”. In THIS way, you can go through your B&W or color negative collection. And yes, make the occasional image capture with your phone and send it to the kids with a note “Just came across this of your 2nd birthday party!… You were so cute! Remember Dougie… heard he’s getting out with good behavior in 2 years….” Something like that.Ditto for slides. Holding them up to the light is a pain. This way you can enlarge the image and see what you’ve got and make that all important decision: “Keep this important image as it’s a critical piece of family history that my kids and descendants will value and thank me for saving” or “toss it as the kids won’t give a rip about the 6 people in this picture who they’ve never met and of whom I only remember 4 of them myself…”At that point, after going through your “collection” you should end up with perhaps 1/5th or 1/10th of what you’ve started with, and can start scanning the remainder with a high-quality scanner (they are not very expensive) and working with image-editing software (that will usually come with the scanner if you don’t have something like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (a much easier and less expensive version of Photoshop with all the most commonly used essentials) to make the best image possible. (Highly recommend it if you are just getting into image editing and don’t really need the full blown Photoshop.). REMEMBER: you are now dealing with ONLY those absolutely-precious family heirloom images that you and your kids will want preserved for posterity. You’ve tossed all the useless junk images. It will be worth the effort.Once taken, the app allows you to easily save to the phone (bad idea) or email/text/airdrop/post images.Alternatively, there are several services where you can bundle up your images and send them off to be professionally digitized with properly adjusted contrast, exposure, color balance, etc, and returned in a few months, all while you wait for a few months with no effort on your part. “A few months” you say/complain? What’s the rush NOW? These are images that have sat in the back of your closet forgotten for decades, and now you can’t stand to wait a couple of months? If that’s the case, that’s a separate personal issue beyond the scope fo this review…So, yes, this is a good product, inexpensive, and allows you to view a large volume of negatives as positives and also color positives (slides) for easier viewing and decision making, and making the occasional image from them to send to the kids or grandkids. But it is not for volume conversion or quality conversion.

One thing people need to know about this product is that even though the 35 mm negative has way better resolution than a 4x6 print, don't be fooled that great resolution in that negative will naturally translate into a great resolution image file. Using a phone to take a photo at the distance this scanner provides on a tiny 35 mm negative is always going to give you poor image quality because the film is so small and the resulting resolution will be very low even though it is completely focus. I use my iPhone 7 which has great camera and the free app from Kodak to attempt this scan on my 35 mm negatives from 30 years ago. It gives me an image file of 400 KB with very grainy and off balance color image. When I point that same camera to the 4x6 print from 30 years ago from that same negative, I get a much better image file of 3 MB with much better color and details. I don't have those professional scanner, nor do I have any image editing software. So my guess is that professional scanner can probably generate an even better image from that negative because the negative itself has very good resolution in it. So if you have a 4x6 print, even from 30 years ago, it would be better to take a photo of that print than to use this scanner to take a photo of the negative. I think a lot of people in the review said they were happy about the image produced by this scanner was because they did not realize that the negative has great resolution and could give you way better image if using the right tool. I am no way near professional eyes, but the image produced by this scanner is horrible that even I can see, especially after I used my phone to take a picture of the original 4x6 print and saw that huge difference. I have returned the scanner. If you just want to use this scanner to see roughly what is in a negative, it is ok. But any attempt to convert that negative to image file will be pretty disappointing unless you are willing to spend a lot of time and efforts to post-process those image files.

This was a great way to digitize old slides into my camera phone where I could easily use photo editing apps to tweak and improve the images. I received it yesterday and have already scanned almost 100 photos. Some things to consider:-This is not a scanner, rather a small platform with a lamp where you place the slide (or negative.) There’s a cutout for your phone’s camera which aligns with the image and you capture the image that way.-That said, it is a camera-phone-quality image, which could be inferior to an actual scanner which would transfer the image directly onto a memory card or computer.-You need to download an app to use this product, which was easy to use. HOWEVER, it may have been developed for older model phones, because I tried using this with my iPhone 12 Pro Max, and the images were extremely difficult to capture. I happen to have my old iPhone 8, and once I switched to that one, it was smooth sailing.-Product assembly was very easy, and the instructions were easy to follow. You won’t need a memory card to work with this, but you will need two AA batteries.Overall, very pleased with this product and glad I didn’t have to spend a ton for a product I won’t use much once I’m done scanning. But in case I do, the product can be collapsed back to fit in the box it ships in, for easy storage. Highly recommend.