Aldi Slide Scanner

OK, I now have one Tevion/Ion/Optex 35mm slide scanner. Tammy got the Aldi store manager to reserve her one last night and so she managed to pick one up this morning. Was it worth the effort?

No, not really. The software is really poorly constructed and the installation is not as simple as it should be. In actual use it is a bit clunky but we could forgive all of that if it worked. On Vista the bundled software first does a calibrate. Why it does this is not clear because it then proceeds to take a simply dreadful image. Far too dark and with a blue cast although the software works better on Windows XP. It also crops a lot of a 35mm image and again there is nothing that you can do. Using Photoshop to import the image the colours were much better and acceptable for a £40 scanner. These images are all unretouched.

From slidescans

It is also annoying that there is absolutely no manual control over the capture process. It should be possible to adjust the settings to get the scan optimised for how you want it but instead you get what it thinks is best. It spends the next 20 seconds ramping up the exposure to something reasonable. Everything looked OK but zooming into the bright areas revealed a sinister flaw. High contrast edges are so poorly handled that they get edged in cyan or green as you can see in this detail.

From slidescans

For the technical among you who know your Fourier, an edge introduces high frequency artefacts which should be clamped but in this case are allowed to ring out of band. This results in cyan splodges where there should be black. Unforgivable even for a cheap scanner. So an interesting device with potential let down by shabby firmware.

The last bad mark against the scanner is the limited dynamic range. If the image has too much contrast then any dark or light detail is lost so don't expect those lovely wispy clouds to show up.

The resolution is good if you get the exposure right but you have to hack it and this is how. If you take the slide out and let the camera gaze at the white light the exposure ramps down. Then you put the slide back and it slowly adjusts to the dark. You time it just right to take the picture when it gets to the exposure that you want and then you can see the detail like the shop sign that says "Gloucester Flooring Supplies"

From slidescans

This image of Victoria Basin was taken by Stonehouse Wheelers member John or Peter Coleman probably in the 1980s. The boats in the foreground are called Glevum and Severn Trader. Interestingly it is the same boat and viewpoint in Alan O Watkin's image
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Another bad point I discovered later. The OVT scanner software often makes a process called System use all the CPU. The only way to be able to keep using Photoshop is to increase the task priority to high. Then of course all my other processes will stop working. The software is truly dreadful and makes a poor product even worse.