Customer Reviews

Wolverine F2D 35mm Film to Digital Image Converter with 2.4-Inch LCD and TV-Out

5 star:		(124)
4 star:		(84)
3 star:		(31)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Recently ended up with several thousand family 35 mm slides and promised my brothers I would scan the slides and create a digital collection for each one of them. Received the scanner and after a bit of reading, had the slide scanner up and working relatively quickly. Previously I scanned on an HP Scanjet 5470 and the process was slow and not the best copy quality. I am finding that of the slides I have scanned so far with the Wolverine scanner, they are all coming out on the dark side and require work to optimize contrast, etc. Many of the slides that are winter shots are washing out as if the light source in the scanner is not consistent across the surface. No amount of processing with software has, so far, taken the scanned images to an acceptable image. If I had to do it over, I would invest in a better scanner.

First I need to say the reason I bought this scanner was so that I can scan film shot on an odd format 35mm narrow frame camera so I just needed a scanner that could scan negatives that I could do my post work on later if I needed to. This scanner does that with the brutal honesty that I needed so that I can fix my errors in post and also learn from them. If you took a crappy picture with your camera this thing will render a crappy scan. If your scan is dark or light blame your camera work not the scanner. I ran a roll of mostly overexposed photos through this scanner and the correctly exposed photos looked great, the overexposed photos, not so much. A little post magic with Gimp (free photo processing software, very hands on) and I have a great set of pictures and know what I did wrong. I had a local one hour place process and scan this same roll for me, and all the photos they did looked great, thy admitted that they "enhanced" them. This scanner shows you what you actually shot so you can correct it next time.

So how easy is it to use? From the time I stuck my knife into the tape on the packing box to the time I scanned my first frame only reading the instructions to around page three was about 6 minuets. It took me about 20 min to scan an entire uncut roll of film and get it onto my computer. The unit shows a live view of what you are about to scan so it is easy to position your film, the carrier centers it top to bottom, you have to do left to right. I still have not read the instructions beyond page three, and with a little adjusting on some of my photos they look great, next time I will expose a little better and maybe get rid of a lot of post work, tat was an hour that taught me the value of a light meter.

Some things to note. What is not in the box. There is no SD card, and no TV connecting cable but for $109 who cares I have SD cards, and the built in screen is good enough for the scanning work. The unit is compact, it is smaller than 4 VHS tapes. The film holder does a nice job holding the film. I didn't use the slide holder so I don't know. Like it says, you do not need to hook this to a computer so if you have power you can scan any place you want to like on a table with room to put things and not at a computer desk with little or no room.

Overall unless it dies some time soon I'm really happy with it.

Received this today and within 20 min. was scanning slides. After scanning to SD card 10 slides, took card to printer. The prints were quite good. Since I have 2000+ slides to scan did not want to use the Epson flat scanner to do this--takes way too long to scan slides. Some slides date back to my Grandma taking pictures in 1948. If the slide is on the dark side it will come out a little darker than origional but is still okay.
Highly recommend this for the amature person who is not looking for perfection. I am happy with the results. At least you can now send digitized photos from the long past to your friends and relatives by e mail.

I bought this particular digital converter based upon a number of generally favorable reviews compared to other similar products. After rummaging around my attic and pulling out boxes of 35mm photos with negatives and color slides, I began the tedious task of sorting through the thousands of images to determine what I wanted to save. Anxious to put the Wolverine to the test, I selected about 50 slides and 40 negatives to get started.

I read the instruction manual a couple of times, and then connected the USB cable (supplied) into the unit and then into my computer. Before powering it on, I put four slides into the tray (there are separate trays for negatives and slides), being careful to blow dust away. I used the small cleaning tool provided on the light table, which entails inserting the tool into the opening with the soft side down (if it's upside down, the tool will catch on the cover). I then powered it on, followed the easy instructions, selecting `slides', inserted the tray into a slot in the side until the first slide appeared on the LCD screen, pressed `ok/copy' to scan, then pressed it again to save. I then pushed the tray until the next slide was in place and repeated this procedure. It took mere seconds per image to scan and save.

Before you scan an image, it can be rotated 90 degrees right or left and saved.

I then placed four 35mm negatives into its tray, selected 35mm from the menu (it will also scan b & w negatives, but I've not tried them yet), used the cleaning tool again, inserted the tray and repeated the process described for slides. Again, about five seconds per image. So it's fast, what about image quality?

While I bought a SD memory card for the unit, I've yet to use it. Instead, the Wolverine will store images that can be pulled on your computer screen, acting as a memory card. It won't hold much (about 40 images or so, depending), but it is handy to use. Selecting the USB icon and hitting `go/copy' twice sent the images to my computer. Pulling the images up, I noticed immediately that it is essential to clean the light table as well as possible, as every bit of dust shows up, causing speckling. I think every other reviewer mentioned this, for good reason. As for how faithfully it reproduces, my overall grade is `B+'. Setting aside the dust issue, I think the Wolverine does a pretty good job of it, better than I anticipated, actually. The colors were fairly accurate, including flesh tones; image sharpness and contrast did not seem to be diminished from original photos. I did find that (not surprisingly) original images, whether slide or negative, turned out good or not so good depending on the original image. In particular, shots in low light, especially indoor photos seemed too dark. Conversely, shots in well-lighted areas or outdoor daytime shots looked really good.

I sent the images I wished to keep to a folder on my hard drive, and played around a bit with some imaging software (ArcSoft PhotoImpression). I was able to apply some fixes to the darker images, which should be a snap with most any imaging software. I then deleted the images from the Wolverine, and repeated the process. I will probably insert that SD card I bought once I really get into some major conversion sessions, but for relatively small batches, it does well enough.

I do think that the Wolverine does a slightly better job on 35mm negatives than slide; whether this is due to the fact that negatives are usually kept stored and rarely touched compared to slides, or whether the Wolverine just does a better job on negatives, I don't know. The difference is not very noticeable, but overall I do think negatives fare slightly better.

While I haven't spent that much time using the Wolverine, so far it has performed as well as I had hoped. Keeping foremost the importance of trying to keep as much dust away as possible, this device is easy to set up and get started, feels solid in construction, requires no software, can be powered either by a USB adapter (supplied) or directly from the computer, and really does a great job. I don't know how it will hold up in the long run, but so far, I'm pleased.

After using this little device for all of 5 seconds, I decided I needed to write a review. I agree with the other reviewers as of this date. This is very simple to set up and use, and the negative scanning goes rather quickly. Much more quickly than scanning them with my flat bed scanner (which I do love!).

Overall really good quality - well worth the $100 spent! All of the photos I scanned turned out wonderfully - full of color, exactly like the photo sitting next to the computer. I even ended up with a few more pictures since some of the negatives were cut, and now I have access to those photos! Some of the photos my parents scanned ended up with a bluish tint. I'm not sure if that was simply the lighting in the shot itself. If you have knowledge of Photoshop you can tweak your photos after the scan.

If you are thinking about buying this scanner, one hundred dollars is an inexpensive way to save such precious memories. My parents were able to scan so many photos. I cried as I looked through all of them, especially the photos of people we have lost along the way. Negatives aren't going to last forever, and neither are photos. Going digital to preserve your memories is something I highly recommend, and I highly recommend using this scanner to do so.

I purchased this scanner and while it is quick to get it up and running, the output is NOT what I would consider acceptable quality. I have several hundred 35mm slides which I need to scan and many are very nice quality. This scanner produced very dark and purple-blue images which are quite difficult and almost impossible to overcome in Adobe Photo Shop because they are so poor when they come out of the scanner. A good slide scanner should provide you with an acceptable image that is not overly bright, dark, contrasted, or injected with too much color saturation. That way you can make a little "tweak" to them with photo software to bring them up to a very nice image, somewhat compatible to the original slide.

The user guide that comes with it is very poorly written, almost like it was written by a person from another country that doesn't quite have command of the English Language. Some of the instructions are rather "squirrely" and you have to put the user guide down and just play with it to figure out what is going on. After playing with it for an hour or so, I realized that this is more of a plastic toy than a true 35mm quality scanner, so I returned it.

If you just have a bunch of old slides you want to slap into digital format and you don't care about the quality, then this might work for you. Otherwise, you might be better off to look at some of the flatbed scanners that also do slides. It takes more time to scan them, but what you get is going to be a lot nicer to look at, especially if they are of family members or memories that are important to you.

This is one of the slickest products I have ever used. Got it last night and scanned my 20+ year old wedding photos within the first few minutes. Yeah, I'm sure you could get slightly better picture quality from a professional scanner by spending hundreds of dollars more, but I am an imaging perfectionist and I am thrilled by the bang-for-the-buck of this scanner. For photos that are only going to be viewed on a computer monitor or as 4x6 or 5x7 photos, this thing is amazing. If you are a professional, looking to create image files for commercial purposes, this is not your scanner. But if you're like me, with boxes of decades-old 35mm negatives (or slides) that you simply want to add to your digital collection, this will not disappoint. It is so fast and easy to use. Stick in an SD card, turn it on, and stick in your negatives. It scans and saves each one in <5 seconds. The live-view screen is wonderful, and the fact that you can do all this without a computer is fantastic. I plan to scan negatives from my sofa, while watching TV tonight.

My only nit-picks are that I don't like the way the USB/power connector attaches. I may tape it in place so that the leverage of the 90-degree angle doesn't accidentally break it. The images are coming out just a tad over-exposed, but not blown out. The best photos may get a minor Lightroom tweak just to take the exposure down a tiny notch. The color and focus seem just as good as what the original SLR produced all those years ago. Yeah, it picks up more dust than you can imagine, but that's hardly the scanner's fault. So far I've used it on Kodak and Fuji negatives and it adjusts to the differences quite well, and automatically. (I used to work at a photo lab and we had to program the big beasts with different "recipes" for the different film stocks, and if you told it the wrong type, the colors would be off. This little baby seems to do all that automatically just by optically scanning the film base.) It uses LEDs for the scan light, so it should last forever. (Of course, once you're done with your negatives you can always resell it to the next guy.)

I dare say that it's fun to use, especially seeing all those long-forgotten photos now becoming accessible again. I was a little hesitant to buy it - how good could it be for the price? Great decision. Great little product. You can even pay your kids to do the scanning... it's that easy. BUY IT - you'll really enjoy it.

UPDATE: Still a great product for the money, and I heartily recommend it, but I'm lowering my review to 4 stars just because it's not as amazing at color correcting as I originally thought. It seems to be calibrated better for some kinds of film stock than others. I used a lot of Agfa in my film days, and the scanner doesn't recreate those colors as vividly as it does some of the others. Dust specs are also a MAJOR nuisance, you'll be amazed at how they are exaggerated, but I don't blame the scanner for that.

I bought this to convert my approximately 5000 35mm photos and slides to digital, and while I was perfectly willing to spend considerably more I'm happy that I didn't. The reason is that every higher-quality film scanner I found is much, much slower--there's no way I'd ever get 5000 frames scanned at over a minute each. I'll be paying to have a few dozen of my pictures digitized at the quality this unit can't provide, but that's only for the most excellent of all my photos.

This thing is small, simple and quick. The slowest part of the entire process is getting my negatives out of their storage sleeves to scan, and putting them back afterward. It's basically a 5MP digital camera with a macro lens and a miniature light table. So the best you can hope for is 5MP image quality--plenty good for most snapshots, but not good enough for your very best "I've got to frame this one" photos. But honestly, only a very small fraction of anybody's photo collection is good enough for that to matter, making it cost-effective to pay someone else to do those few special shots.

One thing the instructions don't make clear is that you need to wait a few seconds after sliding each film frame or slide into position--the auto-exposure setting takes several seconds if the new frame is very different from the one scanned immediately prior. You can watch this happen on the LCD screen, so when the image stops changing it's time to press the button.

Be sure to carefully clean your negatives before you scan them, or you'll get nice, crisp images of your dust and fingerprints!

Finally, and probably most importantly, if you aren't prepared to do some basic image correction on your images, you're probably not going to be happy with your results. All my color scans came out with a definite blue cast--easily corrected if you have the tool and the patience. After some experimentation I found a single set of corrections that makes all my scans look good. This is only required for the color images; black and white comes out, well, black and white (and gray). I use GIMP, which is free, but there are plenty of other applications that will do what's required.

Overall, an easy to use product that does mostly what it says, except for the color correction being a bit off. I'm glad I bought it, but if I weren't prepared to do a little color touch-up, I'd be significantly less happy.

I received this and 15 hours later, had scanned in 1600 photos. The cheapest photographic negative to digital transfer service on the internet charges .29 cents a piece, so doing it yourself will save a lot of money. I saved $500 doing it this way. They turned out great. Here's what I would recommend--

Buy a can of air, the compressed air in a can for cleaning keyboards will work well to keep the negative tray dust free, you don't want to scan that in and have to remove in photoshop later...

You need an sd card with this to scan away-independent of a computer, which is what I recommend for this long slightly tedious but well-worth-it task. If you do not have a sd card, buy the smallest cheapest one. I bought a larger sd card but the scans only turn out to be 1 megabyte a piece so I could have easy just spent $4 to get the 2 GB card.

Lastly, if you are prepared and have all of your negatives ready to go and a little table work area cleared you can easily scan all your photos and then get the scanner on ebay in a weekend, then the cost of transferring your old photos to digital drops to just pennies.

Happy scanning...

The Wolverine is a neat concept and a fun toy, but don't plan to print any image larger than 4x6" or you'll be mightily disappointed. The resolution is, in a word, awful.