Rescuing Old Photos And Slides

Photo courtesy Slim Sharp

Roger Forness, MidWeek and the Star-Advertiser‘s vice president of technology, has been recently using the Slim Sharp 3-in-1 Digital Photo/Negative/Slides Scanner to scan/digitize all his old slides. He wanted me to share with our MidWeek readers how much he loves it.

This scanner allows you to revive your long-lost photos, slides and film negatives as you scan your memories into high-resolution 5.1 megapixel files (up to 2500 dpi). This is a stand-alone scanner with a nice 3.2-inch color screen so you don’t have to connect it to a computer. Since there’s a built-in SD card slot, you save all your scans to an SD card. If you don’t have an SD card available, you can always connect it to your computer as well (PC and Mac compatible).

The Slim Sharp can do 35mm negatives, 35mm slides, 3-by-5, 4-by-6 and 5-by-7-inch photo prints. It is easy to use and fast: You load the negatives/slides into the tray and, at the click of a button, start the scan. It averages about one to two seconds per image. The scanner intuitively does auto focus, auto exposure and auto-color balance so you don’t have to sit there and adjust each picture as it goes through. It’s also very portable, making it easy for you to take to Tutu’s house to scan in all of her photos, too.

The only drawback of the scanner is that doesn’t come with extra trays to load your slides/negatives. But extra trays can be purchased at TigerDirect.com (listed as Wolverine Data F2DS03-MAG Magnetic Slide Tray, Part No: W132-2020). Find it on Amazon.com for $125 (SVP

PS9700 with 2GB SD card 3-in-1 Digital Photo & Negative Films & Slides Scanner with Built-in 2.4-inch LCD Screen) or at Sears.com (branded as the Ion PICS 2 SD, similar pricing).

Screenshot by Alison Stewart

Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: LocalEats

The popular LocalEats app recently made its way to the iPad, and it is a must download for all you iPad users who appreciate good eats. The app is available in 50-plus U.S. cities including Honolulu, and shows a list of only local restaurants to include local chains, but no national franchises.

Unlike the iPhone or Android version, LocalEats for iPad features international cities including London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong and more. On each city you’ll see an information page that links to its Wikipedia entry and local weather. Since all national chains are excluded, this is great to help support the local economy.

There are many options for browsing, including utilizing the GPS to locate nearby establishments and narrow your results by mileage. You also can search via the Top 100, Best of picks, category, neighborhood, price or a combination of criteria. The restaurant information will give you price range, features, meals served, map and descriptions aggregated from other websites. LocalEats for iPad is free for a limited time on the iTunes App Store, so download it now! It’s also free on the Android Market, but 99 cents for the iPhone and $2.99 on BlackBerry App World.