A quick look at a Reflecta RubyScan

I have long been wondering.

If these cheap scanners, was worth anything, in the sense of scanning.

I bought one a day I was at the thrift store, just to kill my curiosity.
I got it with a bunch of other photo related stuff, but if I split the money up between all the things, I ended up paying around $2,5o for it.
I don’t know how much a new one costs, but I can tell you it’s NOT worth it.

Anyway, the handling is pretty easy.

You put your film in one of the film holders – there is one for slide film, 35mm negatives and 110 negatives – then you push that into the side of the scanner until it falls in place, and your good to go.

It says on the box, that no driver is required, but you need to install a piece of software in order to use the scanner, and that’s kind of the same thing.

The software makes you choose between JPEG and Tiff files, in JPEG mode, you have a few choices on the quality of the image, in Tiff mode there is non. Why is that?

Both file format produces an image that’s 5112×3408 and 96dpi, the Tiff is 48bit and the JPEG is 24bit.
The Tiff file ends as a 100MB file – wow and it still looks like crap – the JPEG is only 6MB.

• The JPEG scanned photo in the gallery below, was scanned at the best quality option.

Design wise

We are in the cheaper kind of plastic area. The front lights up blue when the power is on, wow! Other than that, there isn’t much to say.

Awesomeness!? (Or the lack of)

There is absolutely nothing awesome about this piece of junk. I knew it wouldn’t be the best scanner in the world – I don’t even think it scans anything, it just takes a picture with a very crappy digital camera – but I was still a little surprised that it would suck this much.

When you look at the specs, then it all looks pretty good, except for the 96dpi, I’m no expert, but it seems to me like it’s the 96dpi that ruins it all. But it might also be a lot of other stuff that I don’t know about, like a cheap ass camera.

Take a look at the “scanned” photo’s below, and judge for yourself.

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