I am an avid photo taker. I have thousands of photos from the past 40 years. A couple of years ago, I looked for something you could feed old photos into that would scan them into your computer. Nothing was available but then, a few months ago, I found the Kodak 4x6 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner (P460) at Amazon.com and ordered it. When it arrived I used the "quick start" directions and hooked it up to my computer. Within minutes, I was feeding old photos through the device and they were appearing in a photo file on my desktop. I fed photos through the thing all day yesterday. When I finally got tired of loading photos, I had scanned nearly 500 into my computer. The rate that this thing operates is amazing. You place the edge of the photo in the feed slot, it gives you a couple of seconds to readjust, then the motor quietly feeds the photo through, scanning it into your computer. Then, a couple of seconds later, the photo appears in the photo file on the desktop and the machine is ready for another photo. I tested it to see how many photos I could load in a minute and fed between six and seven during the sixty second period. The scanned images were often times better than the wrinkly old photograph I started with. The only thing that slowed me down was that I labeled each photo as it appeared on my desktop. The Kodak 4x6 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner (P460) did everything the ad claimed it would do and more. I was totally satisfied with it and could not say enough good things about it. Kodak 4x6 Personal Photo and Negative Scanner (P460)
This is a wonderful, portable scanner. You could sit and watch tv, and scan your old photos on your lap, its ultra light. Other scanners do more robust projects. But if you just want to get a bunch of your old 4x6's on an sd card...this is the way to go. It does one picture at a time; but quickly. The quality was great.
The compact nature of this machine is what attracted my buying it. Set up was easy, but by the 3rd picture scanned, there appeared a thin white line down the middle of the scanned photo. Then I scanned another picture, it was OK. Another picture was scanned and there were two vertical lines. Some pictures were scanned with good result. Looking at the originals, there was no indication of why this would happened. Read the instructions again, and try the "calibrate" card, but did not helped.
Then I gave up scanning photos, so I tried the negatives. The result was acceptable, but needed some color correction. The machine prefers to scan the images into the SD card, and "supposedly" is able to scan directly into the computer with an USB and the software provided. I scanned more negatives into the computer, then later when I tried to do that again, it only was able to scan into the SD card, despite what I selected on the software screen.
So this was returned to Amazon.
this is a great little machine! I had such fun using it, it is very easy to connect to a computer/laptop, and save all pictures that are scanned. I will be looking for one that will scan larger pictures in the future.
I had hundreds of photos that both my Grandmother and my husbands Grandmother had left me when they passed and now they are safetly backed up on computer files and look great and it only took a few days thanks to this little gadget. It was so easy to use and when I go visit my Mum in March I plan to take it with me and scan all her photos as well. I couldnt be happier with it!
Wow! I am not one to buy electronics online, I like to touch something, play around with it before I buy... but I did this time. I am very pleased. I have thousands of old pictures that I want to add to my digital library & this is perfect. There is not much loss of resolution from the original to the scanned version and the portability, weight, size speed & convenience makes this great to take anywhere. All you need is a place to plug in and an sd card to store your memories. I can go though my mother's old photo albums in less than a quarter of the time I would with my laptop & traditional scanner. So far I have scanned over 600 pictures with no issues and it is so easy that my 6 year old could use it. It is about the size & weight of a stapler, I can put it in my purse & go.
Now, the (not so) bad; if you have something smaller (3x5 or wallet)or a portrait (vertical) shot, make sure you line it up with the guide. A couple of times I have rescanned due to the first try not 100% straight. If you have a picture that was blurry to begin with it will look worse scanned (but that is true for most scanners).
Other than that, I am happy with this scanner. I will update if things change over time & heavy usage.
After looking as several variants of this product from Kodak and Pandigital (the maker of Kodak's models), I chose the P460. It was very easy to set up, very quick, and very easy to use.
I ran a few pictures through without the included sleeve as the sleeve seemed inconvenient and I actually hadn't found it yet. It was tucked into the French part of the user's guide. Anyway, the first picture was fine but I very quickly started to get white strips in the images. I am guessing that dust gets trapped in the mechanism and you get a white line where the dust blocks the scanner's view of the photo.
I then cleaned the scanner following the manual's instructions and used the sleeve. The lines went away. Reasonably happy with the results, I set about scanning a whole bunch of photos. As the P460 scans onto the included SD card, I couldn't see the results. After a few dozen, I put the card into my computer to see how it was going. I was very disappointed. Slowly dust had accumulated in the sleeve. Even though I couldnt see the dust, the scanner could see it and the photos got increasingly speckled with white spots and curvy lines of lint. And then the white strips returned!
I also found the quality of the scans to be irregular. Some scans looked great, others looked all washed out. Some scans were mottled and fuzzy when the original photo was not. So I took a photo and ran it through the P460 and my regular flatbed scanner and then I compared the results. The flatbed scanner's quality was hands down superior. Not only was there no dust accumulation problem, the overall quality of the scan was much better. The P460's image comes over looking "flat" and obviously scanned. I was scanning at 600dpi in both scanners, but the image file size from the P460 came out 1/3 the size as the flatbed. The compression takes out a lot of the nuances in the colors of the image leaving a poor result. Another complaint is the the edges of the photo would still need to be cropped as the automatic job that is done isn't perfect and often leaves a white or black edge.
I am sending this back and now have no solution for scanning about 1500 photos other than by going the slow flatbed route :( - Portable - Portable Scanner'
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