ClearClick Virtuoso 3.0 Film & Slide Scanner

Confusing interface and workflow, but solid image quality

This is an intriguing gadget designed for digitizing old film slides and negatives. It operates entirely separately from a computer, and requires an SD card (which inexplicably must be 32GB or smaller - a frustrating limitation in today's world of large storage that required me to work to locate a smaller card).

Setup is easy, at first... just take the device out of the box and plug it into USB. When it starts up, it takes you to a cryptic menu with no words, only pictures. Your four options are "scan", "act as a USB card reader", "play back previously scanned images", and "set the time and date". When you go into Scan, a further cryptic menu lets you pick between slides, color negatives, and B&W negatives; then, you have to select the size of media you plan to scan. The screen isn't a touchscreen and the buttons on top are cryptically labeled, so good luck interacting with the menu. Fortunately, you only need to do it when setting up your scan session.

To scan, you place your media into one of the included plastic guides, then slot it into the side of the machine. There's a main guide that works for standard 35mm slides, and then smaller guides for negatives and for small format slides that snap inside.

The guide confounded me at first because it doesn't actually hold the slide in place - so every time I tried to align the slide, it slid around. Frustrating beyond belief. It turns out this is probably actually by design, because taking the contraption out and opening it up every time would take too long: instead, this is designed for you to feed in your slides in a continuous fashion from one side, popping out the other side when completed. The next slide pushes forward the existing slide, etc., etc. so you can always adjust the position with just the force of the next one you're inserting. This was entirely unclear to me from the manual and should be better documented in the manual.

Once I figured that out, I had another challenge to overcome: the device shipped with a bunch of dust on the optics inside. Fortunately, it comes with a screen-cleaning-cloth-on-a-stick you can use to go fishing for this dust, so it wasn't that difficult to resolve. But if you feel like there's persistent grime on your slides, it might be inside the machine instead, and that might be true even if it's factory fresh.

The actual scanning couldn't be easier: position the slide, push the button, position the slide, push the button. You can scan in 14mpx regular mode or 22mpx interpolated; I decided to scan in the fully interpolated mode. The resulting images are 5728x3824 pixels, so it's really 22 megapixels: I was concerned that 22mpx was a marketing gimmick where red, green and blue were being counted separately because they never actually gave a real resolution for the sensor, but it seems to really actually capture at the full resolution (and my images had enough detail to match that resolution).

I did find the field of view is slightly smaller than the actual slides, so your framing will be cropped by about 5% during the digitization process. That's a bummer.

This isn't an archival device - if you need every last pixel from your Pulitzer-winning photo, you're better off with an actual scanner. But if you, like me, are faced with a thousand carousels of family vacation slides that nobody has looked at in decades, this is the perfect solution: you can work through them at a pace of a slide every 15 seconds or so, and you'll have them all captured before you know it so you can bring them into the cloud to preserve them for future generations.

I recommend this device, but I really wish they'd invested a little more in the user interface and in documentation to make it clearer how to use it efficiently. It's actually a pretty solid design, but I didn't think it was for a while until I stumbled on a workflow that worked for me. And the vague specs on the listing made me think it was less capable than it actually is. Still, I think this is an excellent choice in an obscure category, and if you have a big stack of old media I think you'll be pleased with it.

Jason and Mary Thompson

March 21, 2023

Easy to use, great results

The screen isn't a touchscreen and the film has to be manually put in and advanced. It did take me a little bit to figure it all out, as some of the menu navigation is a bit tricky, but if I had just read the included manual, the steps are clearly explained.

At first, I missed a setting where I tell it that I'm using film so it didn't inverse the colors. Once I got the colors to invert on the device, the results were amazing (and better than anything I could make happen on my computer). The screen on the device lets you see precisely what it will take a picture/scan of.

The baseball game picture is from 35mm (although it fits better in the 25mm...so maybe it's 25?? It's very old film, lol). The arch and the riverboat are on 110 mm film. The 110 mm film was very yellowed and resulted in a very blue photo when I inverted the colors on my computer. However, once I had the proper settings on the device, the photo came out amazing!

I have a few settings I can change on the scanner itself, which allowed me to brighten the riverboat photo so it wasn't as dark looking. This does require a new picture/scan to be taken, it doesn't edit the one already taken. The results might not be "perfect," but they're definitely as best as I can possibly get with as old of film as I'm using.

With this device, it will take time to scan all my film, but it won't take any time on editing the results. I love it and am so glad I got it. Highly recommend.

Good Picture Quality and Easy to Use

The unit comes well packaged with all the various film/slide holders you will need. Set-up is easy and using this scanner is very intuitive. Large easy to see screen menu and the operational buttons are well marked and have a good feel. This is not a high-volume unit, but the quality is great. Good for casual home use to save all those old photos and slides in digital form. It does not come with a SD card, so if you want to use this scanner out of the box, be sure to order a SD card at the same time.

0:18

Lots of work is required compared to flatbed type

I have at least 100 rolls of films I still keep for whatever reason I am not able to justify. ;-) I tried to scan one strip of film on this ClearClick product. Yes, it works. Yes, it's convenient that there is a screen to check. It's good that you scan your film strips one by one. And that's where I have a problem. I'd use this product to scan those strips to digitize and achieve those film strips. If you have 2 rolls of film. Works great! However, if you have more than 10 rolls then either you need a lot of time and patience, or you need another scanner to scan multiple in various ways. Don't get me wrong it's a great product but not for archiving purposes. At least not for me. Thanks!

0:39

Easy to use and good results.

Film and slide scanners come in all kinds of shapes/sizes/quality-levels and prices. This one is for the average person with a few boxes of personal photos on negatives and slides that they want to preserve without spending a fortune and without sending their photo's out to a professional.

I was able to use it without reading the manual, it's that easy. There are big icons, obvious what they mean, and just a few buttons. It's powered by a USB cable and a USB charger.

I was able to use it with an old SD card I found around the house, but if I didn't have that, I would have been annoyed. If you don't have one, make sure to order one along with the scanner.

I did a few easy-to reach film-negatives and slides I had, and thought the quality was just great for what I was doing. It wouldn't have met my standards back when I was doing some professional photography decades ago. For the purposes of starting a big project of archiving a small mountain of old family memories - this will do the job perfectly I think.

Pat

March 5, 2023

Great for previews and quick sharing

Pretty easy to use and you get a large screen to preview your scans. I got this primarily to scan 35mm film after developing so that I can do quick previews. I don’t really need a scanner for high res or perfect scans at the moment so this work perfectly for me.

You get an instruction manual that walks you through what buttons to press to scan your images. You can use an SD card or connect the device to your computer. I practiced with an SD card and old film first.

Loading the film using the included holder and adapter is easy. I do with the holder held on to the film a little more. The film can slide around so it’s a little difficult to stabilize the images on the end, but not impossible.

Using the menu and capturing your scans is easy. Just use the arrow buttons and OK button to get to your needed settings (i.e., 35mm, b&w, etc.) and you are good to go. A couple of options for editing images in the device and changing resolution, but it’s probably best to scan as is and make adjustments on your computer in my opinion.

This device has its strength as a scanner, based on my trial run. Good for previewing your film. Also is advertised as a way to view and store your slide film shots and film of varying sizes, so potentially many applications if you have a lot of film and slides laying around.

Would recommend this to someone who wants to scan their film (or slides) and isn’t finicky about high resolution or perfection in the scanned images.