Pacific Image ImageBox Plus for Windows and Mac

Black and white photos....taking them,processing the film and then negatives were a big part of my life 40 years ago...and I have thousands (I discovered in this process a few hundred of which are worth a second and third look). But while I had organized the proof sheets with sleeves of negatives I had precious few real prints left...if I did nothing the past I recorded would be gone...nothing and no way for the grand kids to know us in a different time. I recommend the ImageBox to anyone with a desire to salvage (and share on line) the things they thought worth committing to film / photos at the time they snapped the shot. The process is easy to do with negatives,old photos or slides and the enclosed program loads quickly to your computer (trust me I'm no computer Geek,the DVD walks you thru each step so that within 5 minutes your ready to load!). I did a fair amount of homework on this and various similar devices...everyone of the reviews (professional and consumers) pointed to the Pacific Image ImageBox as a "best buy" and I can say without doubt all this advice was right! And I discovered Amazon had the best price...Enjoy!

I had high illusion but prudent expectations with this item. I really badly wanted a solution to the thousands of slides on both sides of the family, but reviews of all these products on Amazon are usually fairly negative.Upon receipt, I installed win7 drivers and fired up. The unit "sort of worked" but it would take literally two to five minutes to recognize each mouse click on the (fairly spartan) interface and freeze the machine all along, making each slide an easy 15 minute trip. If I went through the whole process, the scan appeared fairly good, considering the original was vintage material.The machine I used is a very standard Acer netbook, with a regular win7 Home Premium and no weird configs or software or any peripherals, so the fault must have been on the driver side. I tried restoring the system and reinstalling several times, with the same results.If the self denominated "customer service" had bothered to pick uo the phone or return calls, I might have held on to the product, hoping to find a workaround to an obvious driver problem, but that was not the case. Consequently the product was promptly returned to Amazon, whose service I find impeccable, if somewhat impersonal. I may try the standalone version that writes to an SSD card, which should not have driver problems.

I've been wanting to digitize my slides for some time, and looked into having them done commercially. But that was going to be so expensive. This box does it, and will do my album pictures too. It's a slow process, but I knew it would be. I do not like the editing process with the box so I upload them into a photo program and edit them there. Also, I have some 127 slides that the image is larger than the standard 35mm slides, and it doesn't always do them because some of the slide is outside the range of the box. But I also knew that before I bought it. All in all, I think it was a good purchase for what I wanted to accomplish.

The scanner DOES make scanned copies of slides, but the amount of time it takes to scan just one slide and save is really long. Maybe this is because my computer is running on Windows XP. I haven't tried it on my PC with Windows 7. The quality of the scans is very good and the software allows changes, rotations and other helpful features. I wish the manual could have been a little more descriptive. The product is easy to use, after you've gotten the hang of it. It took quite a while for me to feel confident I was doing the right thing - mostly because the process was so very slow.

This is the third 'scanner' I've purchased to digitize the mountain of pictures we've accumulated over the years. I have a true scanner for 35mm negatives and slides, another unit that will digitize (NOT SCAN) 110 negatives, and now this one for odd sized (usually old B&W) prints.This is NOT a scanner (it actually takes a digital picture) but it does what most others do not in that it will digitize odd sized prints. The little arms that hold the print seem somewhat fragile so be extra careful with it. It's also quite a big unit but does come in nice packaging for storage or shipping to relatives to digitize their prints. It's much faster than using a flat bed scanner.

I have only had this for 1 week but I wanted to review it. When I first set it up and installed the software, I was getting an error message that said that is was not communicating with the PC. I tried many different things, but still got the error. I emailed Pacific Customer Service and within an hour or two they replied with instructions on what to do. After following their instructions and starting from scratch I got the unit to work. I am very pleased with the results. So far so good! I was impressed by how fast their Customer Service/Tech Support Responded. I do know for sure that this unit does not work with Windows 8. I was told that by their Tech. Support. I would recommend this unit to others.

The quality of digital image produced, both in "Best JPG" and "TIF", are unacceptably bad. This device is not worth using because the resolution of the digital image is extremely poor. I cannot imagine why anyone would find this device acceptable - the concept of a non-scanning "scanner" is a good idea, but this produces a level of image quality that almost no one could want to save. If you like your photos then why would you want to digitize them as blurry, heavily pixelated, overly small-size files? BE WARNED - don't buy this!

So far, so good. I've digitized about 800 old 35MM slides and most of them came out beautifully. Some of them (probably due to age and weather extremes) were dark and couldn't be adjusted completely but overall I'm thrilled to have a tool that allows me to get these slides digitized. I would definitely recommend this product - will be loaning it to a friend that has probably as many slides to copy as soon as I finish my other 400...she's excited to try it too.