Kodak Mobile Film Scanner review - this pop-up cardboard device helps your phone digitize your old negatives & slides

Remember when Nintendo brought out its Labo range of eco-friendly accessories for the Switch? Well it seems to be catching on as Kodak has now followed suit with its Kodak Mobile Film Scanner – a simple portable device with an LED backlight which allows you to prop your phone on top of it to digitize them and packs away neatly for storage and travelling.

Popping it open and locking the various pieces of card in place provides a stand for you to rest your smartphone on and use your phone’s camera to take a picture of old 35mm film and slide transparencies against the backlight built into the stand and powered by its two AA batteries. You can also use the free Kodak Mobile Film Scanner app for more features and editing possibilities.

So is Kodak’s Film Scanner cut out to handle your backlog of film and slides or does it land as flat as it packs? I find out…

Kodak Mobile Film Scanner: Specifications

Kodak Mobile Film Scanner: Price

The Kodak Mobile Film Scanner costs $35 /£37 which feels steep for a product that is made mostly out of cardboard, however I have to keep reminding myself that much of the value in this product comes from the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner app which makes it easy to magnify your slides and film on a larger smartphone screen for easy viewing and you can even invert your negatives to see them clearly too. 

It's by no means the best way to achieve a quality scan, but at less than $40 it's undoubtedly one of the most affordable. If you're just looking to flick through slides to do an image cull then you might be better off with a product like the Kodak 35mm Slide Viewer which has a much sturdier construction and is a similar price. While if you wish to digitize your film it'd be worth saving up for a product like the Kodak Slide N Scan ($180/£140) for better quality results.

Kodak Mobile Film Scanner: Design & Handling

The Kodak Mobile Film Scanner is remarkably compact, owing to its flatpack-style cardboard design. Speaking of which cardboard is a very lightweight material with the whole device tipping the scales at just 249g and collapsing down to 10.5x15.5x4.2cm.

When in use the device pops up to a working height of 10.5x15.5x11cm, though if your smartphone cannot focus within 3.3in you’ll need to also stack up two more cardboard extenders which add an extra 5.5cm to the height.

While the pieces of cardboard that make up the main components are a few millimetres deep and feel surprisingly sturdy and are also coated with a satin coating for a premium feel, the extenders are much thinner at around 0.5cm so your phone can feel a little precarious when placed on top of it. The whole cut in the cardboard is also in the centre of the device but the cameras of many smartphones are offset to one side, so to get this to line up does mean it’s a bit unbalanced. I wouldn’t want to use it outdoors and certainly wouldn’t want cardboard getting wet in the rain as this could greatly weaken its strength.

The base is a full inch thick giving the device a sturdy foundation. This is also where you’ll find the battery access where you can insert two AA’s, though no batteries are included which is dissapointing considering its price. The power switch is also located on the bottom of the base which is a bit annoying as it’s not easy to get to once you’ve got your phone all set up on top.

The backlight is also located here with its plastic surround for loading in your color or negative film as well as slides, though its worth noting that the backlight area is only 35x25mm (the same as a 35mm piece of film) so for larger square format ones in the same 5x5cm surrounds you will only be able to capture the most central part of the frame. The backlight looks to be four small LEDs attached to a sheet of 35mm clear plastic with a diffusion screen to spread the light out evenly.

The device is designed to work best with the free Kodak Mobile Film Scanner App which allows users to perform the following actions: Color Negative, Color Positive or Black & White Negative. When scanning you have a simple slider to control the amount of yellow or red is in the image and then once taken you have the option to add a filter, frame, make the border more rounded,adjust the contrast and exposure, vignette, crop, rotate, saturation, sharpness, warmth, pixelate, draw, sticker or add text.

Kodak Mobile Film Scanner: Performance

A big part of the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner’s performance comes down to the quality of the smartphone used with it, how much resolution it has, how good the lens is, its minimum focusing distance and whether it can shoot RAW or only JPEG. So two users are invariably going to have very different results using the same product – your results may vary.

To try and give the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner a fair review I tried as many smartphones as I had to hand, including an old Honor mobile with a camera in the centre for better balance, though my newer Android and Apple iPhone Mini 12 both had their cameras offset so it was a little wobblier. The newer phones also had more than just one rear camera which made it difficult for the phones to focus through the small hole, clearly designed for older cameras with just one central back camera and Kodak could really do with updating this design.

Putting the phone to one side and judging the product just on what’s in the box – I do think it’s quite expensive for what you get considering its a basic cardboard construction with some very simple electronics for batteries to power the LED backlight, though there is value in the app which also comes with it and is free to download.

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I think the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner definitely has some utility, though perhaps not for batch scanning. It’s perhaps best used as a slide and film viewer, to go through and quickly cull your images before using your bigger and better scanner, or sending them off to be professionally scanned. It can be quite difficult to see what’s going on in old film photos, especially if they are negatives so enlarging them and inverting them through the app does make this process much easier than using a standard slide viewer.

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Kodak Mobile Film Scanner: Verdict

The Kodak Mobile Film Scanner could be very useful for somebody culling a large batch of film slides and negatives as it allows you to not only see what’s on the film much larger via your smartphone screen but is also very handy at inverting your B&W and color negatives so you can see what’s going on – something not possible with a conventional slide viewer. But as for actually creating high quality scans of your film using a smartphone – not so much. There’s too much difference between phone models, lenses and sensor resolution to give a definitive answer and your mileage may vary. 

If you’ve got kids or grandchildren that are interested in film this could be a fun and novel present for them and the app is very user friendly and has lots of features, but it’s far from the most ideal setup for creating high quality scans – your phone is often too far away from the film and requires a big crop so it’s difficult to capture all of the brilliant detail in 35mm film. Plus the design is tailored to older smartphones with a central back camera and this doesn't work very well with the latest phones which have multiple cameras and are offset from the centre too.

Alternatives

Kodak Slide N Scan: at digitalcameraworld.com

Compared with the Kodak Scanza Film Scanner, which costs a little less to buy, this one has a larger screen for previewing scans or playing images back once you’ve scanned them, in Gallery view and slideshows. The control panel is rather different but again relies exclusively on pushbuttons, as the larger LCD still isn’t a touchscreen. Even so, operation is simple and effective, and scanning speed is quick, although the actual image quality isn’t overly impressive.

See our guides to the best film scanners, or alternatively consider one of the best slide viewers