A young Chinese boy is carried home by his mother.
Camera Pirate
DO NOT BUY! SVP FS1860 is a lousy scanner. Crops, poor detail, colour, and DR. #ZoranCorp #COACH Review below:
I bought this scanner to speed my scanning work flow. I use a 8800F to scan my home-developed negatives. The Canoscan results are not as good as a drum scan from a pro lab, but I get a quick turnaround and I find them satisfactory for non-commercial images. I generally scan at 2400dpi. The major drawback is the scanner takes its sweet time (about 60 mins per roll), interrupts the PC with a pop-up every frame and is too noisy to run in the bedroom at night.
The SVP FS1860 seems like a good idea. It costs a little over $100 and uses a colour camera to capture images instantly. Unfortunately the scanner is fraught with problems:
- It crops the 35mm standard frame. Images produced are 2592x1944 resolution (4:3) whereas 35mm film, the only film that will load in the scanner, is (3:2) which means 4mm (17%) of the frame is not scanned!
- Colour rendition is (expletive)-awful.
- White balance is pants.
- DR is poor. You can adjust exposure and do multiple scans, but you then have to do HDR on all your images.
- Images are noticeably soft.
- Images exhibit digital noise. That’s one major reason to shoot film and they ruined it.
- It is independent to the PC and while you can read off an SD card (not supplied), it is not a TWAIN-compliant scanner.
- It makes the EXIF title of ever image “My beautiful picture”, sets the Camera maker to “Zoran Corporation” and Camera Model as “COACH”
If you have bought one in America, I’d urge you to return it. Unfortunately, in Hong Kong, we have poor statutory consumer protection laws and a no-return policy, so I have to decide how I want to use it. I have found that I can more or less accept the IQ for some of the B/W images and I shoot mostly B/W. Any important images will have to be re-scanned on my flatbed. What it does do well is preview images quickly, so basically it’s a glorified light box.
EDIT: You see from the photos that it crops the bottom as well and more of the sides than I calculated above.
EDIT: After one roll, the film transport has accumulated debris that can’t be shifted and have become scratched on the inside (all subsequent images will bear all cumulative marks) and it has even scratched my negatives. I have literally tossed out this $100 scanner after one roll. It is crap.
