KODAK SCANZA Digital Film & Slide Scanner

I did a fair bit of experimenting with this over a couple of days. First, let's note a few things. 1) This is not a Kodak product. Whoever is making this is merely licensing the Kodak name. 2) This is NOT a scanner. It projects an image of your slide or negative and takes a digital photo of it. 3) This has both 14MB and 22MB resolution. But the 22MB resolution is merely a software rescaling of the 14MB version, and doesn't do anything for the quality. 4) Once you get used to the menus and controls, the unit is fairly easy to set up. 5) The user manual is all but worthless. It is thick, so you think at first sight that is fairly extensive, but it is not. What you have is 27 pages in English (of which 2 are introductory material and 4 are warranty information, and the remainder of the manual is the French, German, Italian, and Spanish versions of that. There is NO description of any of the cables included. You'll learn more by simply playing around with it than you ever will by reading the manual. 6) Others have said that you have to removed the 35MM slide holder every time you want to scan a new slide. My experience is that you can simply push in a new slide from the right, and it will push out the current slide. The 35MM slide holder will hold two slides at the end, so you will need to remove it to get the last two slides out. 7) The 35MM negative holder is not well designed. You can insert a negative strip from the right, but it hangs up on the left side where the film strip is supposed to exit. So you have to pull the negative carrier out, insert the negative manually into the exit on the left, close the carrier, reinsert it, scan pictures 2-5, and then pull the negative strip all the way to the right to get a shot of the first picture on the negative strip. This also requires you to remove the negative carrier each time, which is another opportunity for dust to enter the scanner. 8) To get a clean "scan" you have to remove all dust from the bottom of the device. A tool is included for doing that, but it does not work well. It tends to just move the dust around, rather than remove it. If there is a way to clean the duster tool, I couldn't figure it out, and the manual is silent about it. The manual does warn against using any sort of compressed air, which only makes sense, since you are likely to just blow dust further into the device. To top it off, the soft, feltlike portion of the cleaning want came loose after about 5 uses. 9) The power cord is short—less than 1 meter. If you don't use an extension cord, you will be doing all of your scans sitting on the floor up against the wall. 10) As others have pointed out, there are no instructions for how to hook this up to your television. I did not try this, but if you are technically proficient, you can probably figure this out. On the other hand, if your VCR just blinks 12:00 all day, you'll probably need some assistance. 11) All of the slide and film carriers feel cheaply made. I can't open or close one without feeling like I'm going to break it. If you buy this to scan some 35MM slides and you break the slide holder, it's now a paperweight, since there is no mention of where to buy replacement holders. 12) Despite trying for 3 hours, I cannot get this to scan 8MM film. (This does not convert 8MM film to a movie file; rather, it will allow you to capture individual frames as still images.) No matter how I inserted the film or adjusted the settings, I could not get an even remotely clear image of an 8MM film frame. This was a major disappointment. Because of all the issues I've mentioned above, I returned this device. I have thousands of slides and negative to scan. This unit is simply not for me. The quality is not great enough to print 8x10 or larger enlargements. If you are more concerned with preserving memories, rather than quality, this unit will probably work for you. If you want to make some 3x5 or 4x6 prints, you can probably achieve that. If you have plenty of time, this unit will work for you. But if you need quality scans that are actual scans, this will not work for you. If you want to print quality enlargements, this is not the unit for you. If you want to scan a large number of slides and negatives, this unit is too slow for that.