Digital scanning of photos.

If you are like me, you will have boxes of photos from years gone by. I have had a digital camera since 2005, and save them to  my computer, but I also have many boxes full of old photo albums going back many years. I refuse to throw them out, they are our family history, but trying to digitise them is a very time consuming matter.

I have a printer/copier/scanner which works well, but when it comes to scanning photos it is a painfully slow business. Not only am I chained to my computer and printer to do it, it takes about 1 minute to do each photo by the time it has actually done the scanning and saving.

I have coveted one of these newfangled scanners for a while. When I was in China I had high hopes of buying one, but never found what I wanted. So yesterday Peter and I went to The Good Guys to see what they had.

Actually our first port of call was JB Hi Fi. They had one model only, and the service certainly left something to be desired, whether we bought one or not didn’t seem to bother them, so we walked out and toddled along to The Good Guys in Helensvale. The shop was not too busy and I had three guys ready to sell me everything they had in the shop.

The scanner is light and easy to use, connects to the power and scans a photo every 1 to 2 seconds.

 

They only had one model too, but at least they took it out of the glass cabinet and showed it to me. I wasn’t sure about this one, it was different from the ones I had seen advertised on TV, but it saved to a USB which is what I wanted, and was a good size so I could sit it on my knee and save these hundreds of photos over the next few weeks as I watched TV in the evenings.

The box. I have only used it one day, but I think it will be a great addition to our every increasing range of tech-stuff.

 

The first hiccough came when I unpacked it and read the instructions. It didn’t save to a USB at all! I had to go back and buy a SD card. The guys in the shop told me it saved to a USB, and I have several spares of those, but I don’t have a spare SD card. So I had to make another trip back to the shop. I complained to them about this, and they were likewise very surprised that I couldn’t use a USB. I had taken the contraption back to them, and sure enough, what looks like a USB port is actually the connection to the electricity.  So in their kindness, they sold me an 8 Gb SD card for cost price, so I was happy enough with that. I went home and decided to have a trial run.

Well, I have to tell you, it is a great little machine! I am a very happy little camper! It is called QPix 3 in 1 Photo Scanner. They call it a BCI International. It looks like a box rather than a flat type of scanner, but it is very light, and so simple to use. There is a sort of flat plastic holder that you put the photo into, you slide that into the back of the scanner, press the scan button, then the okay button, and it seems to take a photo of the photo but the quality is good enough for what I need. It cost me just under $150, well actually Peter, bless his little cotton socks, bought it for me.

The best part of the whole thing is the speed! It’s amazing! It takes between 1 and 2 seconds to scan each photo. So while I was watching Federer finally beat Tsonger at the tennis, I copied and saved quite a few photos and transferred them to my computer.

Another good thing is that it works on electricity. I have seen some scanners advertised that work on batteries, and I would think the battery life would not be long, so that could be quite an expensive business after a while.

So if you are looking for a photo scanner have a look at these. They also save the old type negatives and the little square slides. Some people have hundreds of these things and don’t know what to do with them. Now you do.