Price against other scanners. Good specs.

After being on for an hour, it will not scan slides without severe banding and noise. Negs are okay. I ahve tries two ScanWits which have turned out to be ScanWitless. trying third one soon.

Buy from a place which will allow you to return it if you're unhappy with it. Test it thoroughly and push the brighness, tone curves and leves up to see what it is *really* doing behind those dark satanic scans...

Negs are nice with little noise and no banding. But then they're easier to scan.

Hope you get a good one.

Customer Service

Not used, yet.

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Dual Scan.

Price and quality for a great price. Very good quality scans and prints from them, using Photoshop and an Epson Photo 870 Printer.

Miraphoto software. I immediately switched, after comparing, from Miraphoto to Vuescan. It produces a much higher quality scan, because of it's multiscan feature and is much easier to use. Also, the slide and film holders suck.

You will spend a lot more to get any better scanner but Upgrade the software.

Customer Service

Have not used, but bought because of exchange policy (replacement within 48 hours) and I live 5 miles from their store.

Similar Products Used:

Minolta Scan Dual.

I cant overstate the great deals you can get for this item. If you have a friend who works or deals with Acer, you can buy this scanner for $269 directly from Acer (dealer price) as it has been superceeded by the acer 2740s model which has digital ICE technology. That unit runs for 549 with rebate, 649 list normal.

As far as the performance, simply awe inspiring for the price. In a straight cost to benefit analysis, this unit rates extremely high for the performance you get. I have found the dynamic range to be often higher than the 3.2 it lists as. Side by side scans of color negatives from a nikon coolscan 2000 are almost impossible to distinguish(almost, the nikon is obviously better but ever so slightly), except for the obvious lack of dust and scratches on the Nikon version. That is simply the digital ICE doing its thing. This is to be expected, so plan accordingly. If you wish to scan hundreds of slides, your best option is the coolscan, or the acer 2740s as the digital ice will save you a ton of cleaning and retouching to correct flaws in the scan. If your primary mission is, lets say, scanning less than 20-30 negs or slides a week, then I think the price benefits will outweigh the ease of use.

Okay, first MAJOR gripe is this unit does NOT have a terminator for the SCSI port, therefore you must plan on getting one. Many people (correctly) assume that most SCSI devices nowdays come with a terminator either built in or supplied, or at the very least listed on the REQUIRED EQUIPMENT on the packaging. It doesnt. The only place it says you need a terminator is buried in the troubleshooting section where it explains how to set up a scsi chain. It would have been really nice for ACER to recognize the fact that in offering their scanner at its current price would bring it into the range of individuals who simply have never had experience with SCSI before. Most lower end users can set up parallel, serial, USB. A better tutorial on that would have been nice.

The Miraphoto software takes forever to startup in the beginning of the acquire sequence. It reminds me of when I had a 486 sx20 pc waiting for the windows 95 startscreen to dissapear. On average, 20 seconds. For someone like me who is completely impatient (AMD athlon thunderbird 1.1 ghz 768mb ram), its an eternity. You make your own judgement on that.

The software interface is "okay". Ive seen better. A larger preview window and the ability to zoom on the preview screen without re-scanning would have been nice. Its liveable. Like I said before, I am impatient.

Final gripe, the Negative and slide carriers have a completely idiotic design for locking. Quite simply, I feel like I am going to break it everytime I lockor unlock it. The carrier itself is like an alligator mouth. Two pieces of plastic hinged and attached at one end pretty much resembling what you would expect a neg carrier would look like. However the way it locks the two halves together is its flaw. Its a simple plastic tension "L" shaped tab that fits into a hole. Force the "L" into the hole and it stretches and springs shut. There are three of these, one on the end and two in the middle, side by side. The problem is in opening it. To open the carrier, you must apply force strong enough to overcome the tension in the "L" shaped bracket. Now, every time I open it, The first one clips open but the middle two doesnt intitally, leaving my carrier looking like pinnochio's nose if you can follow the analogy. The other two spring clips release before it breaks everytime, but i can see its only a matter of time before the clips or the carrier itself breaks.

IDEAL for anyone who doesn't mind cleaning slides and takes excellent care of their equipment. Everyone else might find it better suited to either get the ACER 2740s or Nikon Coolscan. Not that the SCANWIT is a poor performer. It performs well, even better than the 4 stars its getting in my rating. There simply isnt a 4.5 star rating, nor is this a perfect 5 unit. It does provide High (not highest) quality scans capable of professional work. But make no mistake, you must put professional dilligence to get the best quality. Bad negative in-bad image out. Dirty negative in-spotted image out. Using the included photoshop 5.0 LE you can edit out and adjust colors and compensate for bad negs, but dont rely on this. Get it right in the first place.

Customer Service

have had no need, yet. Although I will be calling to get a spare set of neg/slide carriers in the near future.

Similar Products Used:

Nikon coolscan ls2000

Auto feed, Cheap, Great spec for this price range

Size too big, poor software, too much noise, very slow

the reasons to buy this scanner beacuse it's cheap with great specifications "3.2D". however, poor software caused installation problem also problem on preview. Also I can see noise everywhere even the pics are taken outdoor with sunlight. Minolta DaulScan are much batter.

Customer Service

no

Similar Products Used:

Minolta DualScan

cheap, good quality, excellent negative scan results

Maybe those plastic film holders we'll see.
Close ups with 400 speed film your going to see the grain especially flash. If its outdoor non-closeup its fine. Fuji 400 the worst for grain I've been told. Konica VX100 200 the best. Kodak 100 200 looks great.

Amazing is all I can say. If you want to make 11X8's out of 100 and 200 speed film your going to be amazed at how much color and detail this little scanner can bring out. My enlargements printed on my inkjet look far superior to my 4X6 premium's from the photolab. I'm not a slide person so I can't help you there. I wish the LE edition of photoshop had more than one undo jeez even the cheapo PI editions and MGI have 10 or more.

Customer Service

Not needed

Similar Products Used:

flatbed scanner

Easy to install under any OS (I've heard about some problems under NT 4.0, but this isn't the best OS for phtography processing anyway), fine sharpness, resolution, color, dynamic range. Solid construction and relatively convenient to use.

Notorious film holders. Who invented them!
Sotware lacks in preview capabilities, poor automatic color and brightness adjustment especially for slides. Missing manual focus.

Nice scanner. Really nice. I don't take in account a price, although I should. It doesnot produce super quality for underexposured shots and probably it works with low light dyes not the way I'd like. Grainy films are disaster for this scanner. You need to spend much time to blur, depeckle and clean noise up if you want to get great result. Lacks of bundled software don't allow to fix problems with grain and noise. But you can easily adjust colors and brightness. I was fighting with some type pf films for a month and finally found the best settings in MiraPhoto and Photoshop. :)
And guys... if you afford to buy Coolscan or any scanner for zillion bucks, don't forget Scanwit. It's much more than worth its money than his overpriced colleagues. But if you're going to deal with poor shots and low quality films, you probably need to consider more pricy hardware. I'm very happy getting brilliant scans on my ScanWit and only recommend it. I'd also recommend consider 2740 which solves most of problems with dust/scratches.
I get best results with slide films like Ecktachrome, Velvia, Provia. Print films with low ISO behaves nicely except for Royal Gold.
Guys from Acer, please, pay more attention to software you develop for scanners and fix these d*m*ed holders!

Customer Service

Average. Tried to rich them regarding the problem with simultaneous using of Acer FlatBed and Scanwit scanners. MiraPhoto and MiraScan clash sometimes with each other. Responded in several days and did not give any clue except to download new drivers. I did not find anything new for Scanwit besides MiraPhoto 2.0 which comes with a box.

Similar Products Used:

CoolScan

average quality for that price. good scanner quality

installation difficult. German driver does not work. Film holder (plastic)broken because of manufactoring error. Electronic "dust cleaning" not efficent. German Driver is often unstartable at Windows 2000

Poor service at Acer and many bugs make me think, that this scanner is nothing for persons that get early in anger. The scanning quality is good - if it works (with german software). No problems found with english software.

Customer Service

very poor. Does not reply on questions. Never received new film holder from Acer though it was under warranty.(claimed several times - but nothing happened)

Similar Products Used:

Canon, Nikon scanner

Great scanner and can't beat the price. Installed perfect on my wifes computer. I suspect peoples problems with instalation are with the computer/self rather than the scanner. I had troubles on my computer, always do no matter what I install, but it was flawless on my wifes. Ideal scanner for the beginner/amature who wants to have fun yet get great results.

Not for the profesional who does loads of scanning and needs ICE. Maybe the 2740s would be a better option. Scanning seems a tad slow but I think any 2700 dpi filmscan is going to be slow compared to 300dpi flatbed. Since I'm scanning for fun it's not that big a deal to me anyway.

Great scanner. If you are on a budget and want to try a film scanner out this is the way to go. I'm giving it a 4 on both counts because it's not perfect, but dang close.
Here's a tip for you. Don't leave the scanner on 24/7. Turn it off when your done. You do NOT need to reboot your computer to have it recognize the scanner. Go to your system properties in control panel and click refresh on the device manager tab. It will take a few seconds but your scanner will pop up.
Oh, also, you do NOT need the SCSI terminator if this is the only thing you have attached to the included A-Card! Works just fine as it is. I have no idea if you need one if you have other things attached to the chain, but I imagine you would.

Customer Service

The first scanner I got had focusing problems. It was a broken gear on the focusing mechanism. Called ACER and after reassuring them it was not my picture taking abilities and not noise from the power cable and that it didn't matter what SCSI ID I had it on, they sent me a new one. Took a week. CS rep. was nice on the phone. CS is 24hrs. :)

Similar Products Used:

Flat bed scanners - YUCK!

REALLY low cost, serial scanning of 4 slides/6 negs, worked out of box, very fast, quiet, reasonable quality, SCSI terminator not needed-no data errors in transmission to computer

Scanned images are soft, requiring sharpening, lots of level tweaking per photo, focus is sometimes off and cannot manually focus, dust is a time consuming problem, grain is apparent

Going into digital photography, so did not want to spend too much. Very satisfied for the price. I found the scans to be quite soft but that works out OK for some people pictures. Yet grain is apparent. I could not get good focus for some film strips and had to just give up on them. If I had many pictures to scan, I would definitely get ICE, as despeckling is very time consuming. I'm a little disappointed that my HP flatbed scans of 4x6 prints often came out about the same quality. If you want high quality archival scans, spend more money since your time is valuable too.

Customer Service

No contact

Similar Products Used:

None

Ease of use, Software in my opinion is rather easy to use. Accurate with negative scans

Film holder seems like it is going to break everytime I use it

Its a shame there isnt a rating for 4 1/2 stars that is what I would give this scanner.. the only thing that keeps me from giving it a 5 star rating is that #&%@*$& film holder and I'm sure the slide holder is the same way.
The scanner was a breeze to set up right out of the box.. I dont use any off brand film other that some Konica Infrared, all films I use are listed in the software. Colors in my opinon are very close. And Ive heard that there is a problem with dust. I use cotton gloves and shoot my negs with a duster. no problems with dust! In my opinion this scanner is very much worth the money!

Customer Service

Havnt had to use

Similar Products Used:

Nikon,Umax,Mikrotek