I know, but it does work.
What I usually do is use it for quick scans and then do nice scans with my Epson. It saves the good scanner and a lot of time.
Strangely, I often think that those companies who produce cheap devices have some creative solutions that expensive gear doesn't. Like in those old days of parallel port scanners vs. SCSI. All the expensive SCSI scanners had a white backplate which somehow made the scanning location detection iffy at best and scanning a single page a nightmare because the light would go through the paper, reflect on the back and be recorded by the scanner. On the other hand, my uber-cheap scanner actually used a black backing plate which cost the manufacturer nothing to produce, made edge detection a cinch and made scanning documents equally easy. And since they were dealing with a slow interface, they actually had a custom chip in the scanner that would jpeg compress the data to move it faster. Cheap easy and smart. I actually used that thing for a long time. They even had a way to increase the resolution by doing some type of in motion and overlay capture. Smart.
Same thing with my instant scanner. It's essentially a fixed focus camera that is set at just the right distance from the film to get a good picture. The lens they use has a small aperture so that most of the stuff where the film can be is in focus. Simple but efficient. The backlight is a simple LED thing. Now just imagine if Nikon produced a similar device with a high end small sensor like the one on the N1 series, a good LCD, a system that would alternate between visible light and IR backlight for dust detection, possibility to adjust exposure and color calibration, raw mode capability, all in one box that saves on an SD card... I'd be the first in line to buy one and since it's still a quite simple device, it probably wouldn't cost more than a couple hundred bucks...
