AmScope

AmScope 10X 20X 30X 40X Stereo Binocular Microscope

I bought this product to digitize about 5,000 slides. I started with 900 slides of my mother-in-law. Many of her slides were Ektachrome and all but the reds were badly faded. It did an excellent job. I had some difficulty with dust just like everyone with old slides. I did the 900 slides (keeping about 600) in just a few long (8-12 hours) days. Since then I've done another 400 in just a couple of short days. It takes me three major steps 1) the scanning process, 2) the editing process, and 3) the renaming process. I have to edit (Digital Image by Microsoft - now defunct) virtually every slide. I crop to 6x4 or 4x6 for most slides. Occasionally I crop to 4x4. On some slides I have to lighten them (poor lighting in the original or shaded faces) and up the contrast a little to a lot on almost all of them. On most I zoom in and delete spots, primarily in sky, white areas, or faces. I can't see spots in multi-colored areas. I then go to My Pictures and change the title on each. I change it to "date, file box and slot location of physical slide, subject. For example, 1962 06 00 D-21 Sandy's birthday party. For most slides I only know the month, so I use 00 for the day. I start with the year, month, and then day so the slides will be ordered by date. If I have a group of photos (like a party or a trip) I order them by adding a letter after the day. Then I can control the order within the group. It's important to put the physical location on the slide in case you want to rescan at a higher resolution to print a photo. Overall, I've been quite pleased. I then burn a dvd, and the family can enjoy an old-time slide show.
Just three days before one year, my scanner deck had a hardware problem. After a couple of hours with tech support, they offered an exchange. I received the new scanner deck the next day. As with my first scanner, it took abut 3 hours with tech support to get my scanner up and running (something to do with Vista and conflicts with my HP 3-in-1 scanner). I have received absolutely wonderful tech support from HP. That alone makes me loyal to their products. However, I now see that a scanner has multiple lights and moving parts. An extended warrenty is advisable. I got an additional 90 days warranty on my replacement, but I'm going to extend it.

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