Right off the bat, the FilmScan 5-Inch posed a bit of a riddle. After connecting the scanner to a power source, I inserted a compatible SD card, but the machine wouldn’t accept it—until I flipped the card over. Unlike most other SD-card readers, the slot on the FilmScan 5-Inch slot wants you to insert the card upside-down (contacts side facing up, label side facing down).
Press the power button, and you’ll soon see a homepage on the touch screen, offering four options. The Capture option enables you to make any necessary adjustments before scanning your slide or filmstrip. With Gallery, you can play back those scans on the touch screen, while USB Upload lets you transfer scanned images from your SD card to a connected computer via a USB cable. A final option, Settings, allows you to change some of the, well, settings that you previously put in place.
Next, load your slide or filmstrip, using the method I described above. When using an adapter, ensure that the four small pins are aligned with the corresponding holes on the slide holder.
Once the adapter is in place, you can close the holder until it clicks shut. If that doesn’t work, you may have to reopen the holder and reposition the adapter.
(Credit: David English)
Before you initiate a scan, use the touch screen to select the film type, film size, and image resolution. With the latter, you can choose either 13 megapixels or 22 megapixels. The FilmScan 5-Inch has a 13-megapixel color CMOS sensor, so that 22-megapixel setting is an interpolated higher resolution. I found it to be only marginally better than the 13-megapixel setting, and, as you would expect, the 22-megapixel images will take up considerably more space on your drive.
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From there on, the process is essentially the same for all the formats. Insert the slide holder (either by itself or with an adapter) into the right side of the unit. Arrow marks on both the FilmScan 5-Inch and the holder make orientation easy. Then you put a slide or filmstrip into the right side of the holder. With a multi-image filmstrip, you keep pushing the filmstrip through until you’re done. You insert slides one at a time, with each new slide pushing the previous ones through.
As you feed the slides or filmstrip through the scanning mechanism, you can use the touch screen’s Preview mode to help center the image that you want to scan, then use the onscreen controls to adjust the image’s color, contrast, or brightness. You can also crop the image, if needed. When you’re ready, press the large scan button on the top of the unit to save the image to the SD card.
(Credit: David English)
Once you’ve saved some scanned images to the SD card, you can try out the Gallery mode. You can either use the on-screen left and right arrows to scroll through the saved images, or you can press the Slideshow icon to start a stream of your scans, where each image stays on-screen for five seconds, then automatically moves on to the next. Once it reaches the last image, the slideshow loops back to begin the sequence again. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the display time, though five seconds seems about right given the size of the screen.
The Gallery mode is a nice feature to have, as the 5-inch color touch screen works quite well as a little digital picture frame. That said, there really should be an adjustment in the settings to vary the display time each image stays on the screen. A random-order option would also be useful when you’ve accumulated a large number of scanned images.
One big snag for the FilmScan 5-Inch: It doesn’t support portrait-mode shots, as opposed to landscape. If you insert a slide that’s correctly oriented for a portrait, the top and bottom of the image will get cut off. You can use the on-screen crop tool to select your preferred portion of that image, but you can’t alter the system to accommodate a portrait shot. After all, the screen itself is in landscape mode.
You can work around this particular problem by inserting your portrait shot as though it were in landscape format. The image will show up sideways, but you can rotate it later on your computer. Unfortunately, there’s no simple portrait-mode workaround for the Gallery feature. The tilted images you saved to the SD card will also appear tilted sideways in your Gallery slideshows.
How about manually rotating your portrait-mode scans using your computer, then writing them back to the SD card for a more consistent slideshow? I tried that, and the results were somewhat disappointing. The Gallery mode did show everything with its proper orientation, but the portrait images were noticeably thinner and shorter than those in landscape mode.
