Ion Film2SD

Cheap film scanners such as the Ion Film2SD are not scanners at all – they are really small digital cameras. When you load a strip of negatives or some slides into the supplied holders and slide them into the device, it shines a light through and takes a photograph of the slide.

Quality from these is usually poorer than from a genuine slide scanner, and that's the case here too. While the results were good enough for viewing, they were nowhere near good enough for archiving (which requires high-quality copies in case your slide or film collection is lost or stolen). On a big computer screen or a TV there was lots of fuzziness and while colours were good, overall results were poor.

The unique feature of the Film2SD is that it scans your photos straight to a memory card – instead of saving your results on the computer you insert an SD memory card (a 1GB one is supplied) and images are saved to that. It can connect to a computer over USB but only to transfer files, at which point the whole scanner behaves like a memory card reader, opening a window on the computer screen from which to copy the image files.

While it was quick (scans only took a few seconds) and easy to use there were some quirks. It's all controlled through icons on the small colour preview screen, and while these are all explained in the manual it doesn't explain how to get to the Home screen containing the main controls. It turned out we had to press the scan button to pretend to scan something, then press the Home button – once we'd figured this out the rest was fairly easy. The slide and negative holders, while sturdy, were quite fiddly and hard to open and close, something we kept getting wrong.

In all, it's a lot of money to pay for poor-quality scans. If you really need to scan on the cheap, the Veho VFS-004, which is nearly half the price, is a better option, or better still go for a full-blown film scanner such as the Plustek Opticfilm or a flatbed scanner that can take film too such as the Canon 8800F.