ClearClick Virtuoso 3.0 (Third Generation) 22MP Film & Slide Scanner (35mm, 110, 126) with Large 7" LCD Screen - Convert Slides and Negatives to Digital Photos

Does what it says. Good resolution on slides. Limited picture adjustment. It is better to use a dedicated app on the computer. Small drawback is that it doesn't connect directly to the computer. Biggest issue is the slide tray. Poorly sized and allows the slides to slip out of alignment. Also only allows one slide at a time. My old unit allowed three.

My ClearClick Virtuoso 3.0 worked very well for one day. On the second day, the exposure light from the unit started to pulsate on and off every second, rendering the device useless. I returned it via Amazon and ordered the equivalent device from Kodak instead. Hopefully, the Kodak device will work well for more than one day! Here is a summary of my observations from when the device worked on the first day. I really liked the 7" display, and the images looked very clear on the screen. Unfortunately, the actual .jpg scans were not nearly as sharp as they looked on the display screen. I set the ClearClick to 14MP (14 MegaPixels) because I did not want to use their "interpolated" resolution of 22MP. When using the 14MP setting, the .jpg files come out at 4320 x 2880 pixels. NOTE: this is only 12.4 MP, so ClearClick is exaggerating when they say it's 14MP. Therefore, a 35mm negative (or color slide) has a resolution of 3048 ppi. This sounds fantastic, and you would expect the scans to look razor sharp. But they're not. When using a dedicated film scanner or a professional flatbed scanner, a resolution of 3000 ppi generates very high-quality images. However, the ClearClick is NOT a scanner. It's simply an inexpensive "camera" that takes a picture of your film. The great advantage is that it only takes 2 seconds to generate the .jpg file. By comparison, when using a dedicated film scanner or a professional flatbed scanner at 3000ppi, it takes at least 3 minutes to make just one complete 35mm scan. The disadvantage of the ClearClick is that the scans are not sharp and that's because they are actually being created by a cheap "camera" with minimal optics. This brings us to another point, the matter of dust specks on the film. Because the ClearClick does not have high-quality optics, there are not too many obvious dust specks on the images. By comparison, when using a dedicated film scanner or a professional flatbed scanner, you might see hundreds of dust specks that the ClearClick simply does not resolve. That's why high-end scanners use special infrared technology to hide dust specks on the film scans. So, how do we deal with the low-quality images from the ClearClick. Well, that depends on your needs. For example, if you go ahead and make a 4" x 6" glossy print from the ClearClick .jpg file, it will look pretty good. However, if you make a poster-size print, it will definitely be "soft." When viewing the ClearClick scans on your computer monitor, they are rather "mushy." Keep in mind that if there are people in your images, their faces won't look great when viewing the files at 100% size on your monitor. I was able to drastically improve the quality of faces in my ClearClick images by importing the files into TOPAZ Photo AI, an expensive program (from TOPAZ Labs) that works miracles on people's faces. The TOPAZ software makes the faces look even better that what you can get from a dedicated film scanner or a professional flatbed scanner. It's absolutely amazing. So, I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new Kodak device with its 7" screen and identical characteristics that match the ClearClick. My workflow is as follows: 1) Obtain the 12.4 MP .jpg file from the SD Card that it was saved on in the ClearClick. 2) Import the ClearClick .jpg file into TOPAZ Photo AI and let it work its magic on the people's faces. Save the enhanced TOPAZ version as a .tif file, rather than a .jpg file, to avoid further re-compression of the image. (NOTE: This can be done as a batch job in TOPAZ, so you can process dozens of files without even being at the computer.) 3) Load the new TOPAZ .tif files into Photoshop and get rid of any obvious dust specks. Apply color corrections and other Photoshop enhancements if needed. Even though I have a high-end flatbed scanner, I prefer using the ClearClick because it's just so darn fast. I do not enjoy traditional film scanning when it takes 3 minutes per image! Hope this helps.

So we've used this a bit now that we've had it for a few months. It works great! Out of all the scanners we've used for our numerous negatives, this is far and away the best. Easy to use, one can get through boxes of negatives in a surprisingly short space of time.

The scanner worked very well out of the box. It's plug and play in that you can transfer the scans from the memory card to the computer without taking out the memory card from the scanner. The pictures come out fairly accurate. and adjusting the light balance is very easy. Scanning per picture is literally a push of the button and maybe a second for it to process. You don't have to take out the adapter between negative strips. All that said, here are some cons. 1) Even with the negatives in the adapter tray, the negative can slide up or down and cut off a bit of the picture. 2) I understand the need for it (mostly) but if the unit is on and you either put an SD card in, or take it out, the machine turns off. 3) After scanning around 1500 or so negatives the buttons seem to want to take their sweet time in getting to the function I need. One example? I was sitting here for around a minute when I needed it to switch from a scanner to a viewer. All in all, I was happy with the product even though its "end of life" came way to quickly.

Out of the box it works as expected. Will be using it to scan 3-4000 35mm slides plus an yet undetermined amount of 35mmnegatives. Positioning the slides is a little bit fiddly to center each in the view area. Once the slide tray is full it is pretty easy to push and pull each end, then hit scan. I found using a tongue depressor (a popsicle stick should work) to position the last or single slides. Cleaning the slides is critical, all dirt shows plainly on a larger screen. The brightness and color adjustments are usable but seeing the effects on the 7" screen is not clearly seen, especially for old eyes, so I will use something like XNVIEW to make my final adjustments on the computer. You need to set the date and time each time you plug it into power, It forgets when power is removed. Overall it is an excellent device for the price vs features.