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October 1, 2008

Veho VFS-004 review

Product Code: VFS-004

The Veho VFS-004 Deluxe Negative & Slide Scanner is a standalone USB device dedicated to 35mm slides and negatives.

Film adaptors (for use with slides and negatives) on scanners are nothing new. But as anyone who has ever tried to archive an entire collection of slides will know, using a normal flatbed scanner for this purpose is frequently far from easy. The film adaptor is often fiddly to use for any length of time, and many scanners have difficulty distinguishing between slides and negatives, and more standard A4 material.

So enter, then, the Veho VFS-004. This standalone USB device (no power supply is needed) is roughly the same size as a compact photo printer, and is dedicated to 35mm slides and negatives (both colour and black & white). The installation routine is straightforward, and consists of loading up the drivers and additional applications, and then starting the calibration process, which takes just seconds.

The Veho VFS-004 is somewhat basic in operation. A pair of tray holders is included, and they take up to three slides or six negatives. Once you've inserted one of the holders, you see a live picture of what's being viewed. You then pull or push the holder to line the viewer up with the negative that you want. Once you're happy, click the button on the top of the scanner and save to a directory of your choice.

Even at the highest quality setting, the Veho VFS-004 takes just a couple of seconds to transfer an image, and we reckon you could load up a holder with slides and save to disk in the space of a minute - something not realistic with the typical flatbed.

The scan quality is quite good. At the highest setting, the Veho VFS-004 produces 4MB+ files with a resolution of 2592x1680. Blown up on a 1,680x1,050 flat-panel, the pictures continued to pack plenty of detail with no sign of pixellation.

Both slides and negatives transfer well but, while colour is fine, the Veho VFS-004 isn't quite so good on mono images. Where the subject is a photo, the scanner was fine. However, slides depicting illustrations from Robert Hooke's Micrographia lost some of the fine detail that's a hallmark of this work.

Unfortunately, the Veho VFS-004 is let down by rather clunky software. The scanner operation is fine, so it's a shame that, in Vista, the scan software threw up so many faults. From annoying error messages on missing DLLs, to random crashes, we experienced a variety of niggles. Fire up the software front-end and it's fine, but switch to another program and come back and the scanner frequently appears to have frozen, or refuses to display the correct colour.

Only some of the problems were resolved by downloading new drivers. The included image editing software (ArcSoft's Photo Impression 6) is functional but basic, but you'll probably have your own software should you want to start truly manipulating images.

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Independent customer reviews from

Veho VFS-004 scored:
5.5 out of 10 100% real reviews

The only review:

30 Sep 2008 Tim, Croxley Green

2

Good Points

It is easy to use etc...can make hi or low res scans and can deal with slides or negatives

Bad Points

I have had poor quality results...even when the actual slide is perfectly ok? I was expecting to be able to turn the brightness and colour up or down to achieve an optimal scan? Thsi doesn't seem to be possible... so the scanned result is either unusable or very poor quality compared to the original slide? Am I doing anything wrong?

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User Reviews

Sunday, 17 May 2009

Reviewed by Chauffeur33

Star Rating: rating of 2

Duration of ownership: 2 weeks

Strengths:
Great loading trays. Easily connects to computer.

Weaknesses:
Light source is too bright for conversion needs to be adjustable.

Overall Evaluation:
Should have saved my money. Disappointed.

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

Reviewed by Bluewode

Star Rating: rating of 2

Duration of ownership: 30 days

Strengths:
Simple to set up.

Weaknesses:
When converting my 35mm colour photographs - they were all over-exposed, which can be fixed using a photo editor, but that takes time. Comments on Amazon confirm others have same problem.

Overall Evaluation:
Emailed Veho to highlight my concerns and get a fix - no reply from their support team - used my Canon scanner instead - so really, I spent £100 to make this task easier - but it didn't work out, so it is now sitting on my shelf gathering dust

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