Customer Reviews

Epson Perfection 2580 Photo Scanner

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though I'm a scanning veteran, having worked my way through a few generations of SCSI and USB devices, I must admit to being mightily impressed by the 2580 and at least parts of its software package. If a tad clumsy to use at times, the bundle offers an option to do some color correction of faded prints as they are scanned, and another nice one to easily scan multiple images at once, properly setting up separate files for each. One can choose default, home or professional settings to fine tune scans. Like most scanners in this price range the 2580 has buttons on its front which provide for instant scanning, e-mailing, etc.

The proof is in the pudding and I must say results are just fine. Although I've yet to try the film strip reader, results with old 35mm slides were easily equal, if not superior, to a far more expensive Olympus slide scanner I bought a couple of years ago. A couple of old 2x3' prints turned into beautiful 8x10's, and so on. The USB 2.0 connection is very fast (once the scanner warms up), and despite its features the scanner's footprint is pleasantly small.

Now for some precautionary information. The Epson's twain driver apparently doesn't like competing with those left over from previous scanners, particularly Canons. So if, after following directions to install the scanner very carefully (you MUST install the driver software with the 2580 disconnected) it does not fire up when called from the Epson supplied apps, or any other scanning ones you have, be sure to fully uninstall other scanner drivers and be sure to kill the older scanner in device manager as well. My main computers run Win98SE and I've yet to see what would happen were I to use it with my XP laptop which has portable scanner software on it. But keep my findings in mind and save yourself a call to customer service.

As for the application software's usability, the included ArcSoft program provides basic editing as well as a neat set of projects (make your own calendars, etc.) but serious users will want to scan into Photoshop or another more feature-laden program. The 2580 works well with both a Paperport program I've used for years (and has many good features) and Photoshop Elements, my editor of choice.

There is no printed manual or even a big pdf one. This said, the html-based help feature is easy to use and, in terms of software and general setup issues, quite good.

Finally, I had to call Epson support for some help on the driver issue, my initial concern being I had a hardware problem. Direct telephone help is a long distance charge, but I must say my call went through to a real live person almost instantly, and her support was friendly and fast. And, no, Epson has not outsourced its help desk to the other side of the world. It's right in the middle of America, in Colorado.

All in all a fine product.

I bought this scanner to scan in my old negatives. This scanner will do that with no cropping required, although it is a bit of a skill to get each strip to load properly at first. I do however have a problem with this scanner, and that is that is isn't as good as it should be in aligning the negative frames with its scans. The the process of scanning is itself quite tedious as it takes about a minute per frame (yes frame, not strip, and more if you want better quality), but to be expected. However, I find some of my scans come with black edges where the alignment is just not quite right. Is this the end of the world? No, but it is annoying to have to rescan perhaps several times to get the image to occupy the full frame with none of the border also captured. This is supposed to be all automatic and to spare users from having manually to align negative strips in little plastic holders, and it does that - but the process isn't as automatic as it should be.

So I did a lot of looking around at the more expensive scanners, then this one caught my attention. It was given a best buy award from PC World, and four other top review sites gave it good ratings. I thought cheap price and good ratings, wow, that can't be true.
I ended up buying this scanner with a rebate. I got it home and setting it up was a snap. It does seem a little flimsy in comparison to my 6 year old Hp 5200C (which was enormous). The included software is really a joke. I agree with the poster who said it can be confusing. So until you want a headache, my advice is the stick with the desktop icon "Epson Scan". Also for your first scans stay with "Home Mode" not Professional.
Now on to the scans, first I scanned a 4 by 6 colored photo at 300dpi, and it looked fine. To my surprise, it looked about the same as my 6-year-old scanner. The colors were true, skin tones were great, but dark and light areas had just a tad too much contrast. Easy to fix with Photoshop (or other photo editor).
Then I tried the film scanner, which I have NO prior experience. Now I should mention I was using the Professional Mode and scanning at 600DPI. My first scan was horrible!! The picture was so soft it appeared to be out of focus!! My daughters' blue dress appeared purple, and over exposed. After many more tries I started to wonder why it got such High ratings? There had to be something wrong. The next day, I started the scanner in "Home Mode", played with nothing, and on the first scan got a picture that actually had More detail than the original print. Other than changing to "Home Mode", I don't know what could have been the problem. I've now scanned 60 35mm filmstrips with what I would consider great results. The film feeder works great but not flawless. No filmstrips have been damaged, and I find that lining your filmstrip edges up with the metel bar as your putting it in the scanner works best. If the scanner won't take in the film, you may have it the wrong way as it's hard to tell (with old film) what side is up and what side to put towards the scanner. Also, I'm scanning now, as I'm online typing! So it doesn't hog your system like some programs. Lastly one reviewer said you'll be taking scans of dust, and it's true if there is dust and prints on your filmstrip. Then there will be dust on your digitized image too. I find a lent cloth works great for taking prints and dust off a negative. The only other thing I want to mention is the life span of this scanner is only 10,000 cycles, the more expensive scanners have about 36,000 cycles. My conclusion is, that for the price it's a great buy. I would have given it five stars if it won't for the software issues.

Before purchasing this scanner, I was a bit afraid that it was priced too low for the quality I wanted. Turns out I was wrong. I've scanned almost 400 frames from negative strips so far, and couldn't be happier. I've been using the 200 dpi setting, which is just fine for my needs, although it will go much higher.

There are a couple of things to point out. The auto-feeder has trouble grabbing bent negatives. It also has trouble with night-time photos, because it can't see the separation between the frames. The software is pretty easy to use, but still could have been written a little better.

Also, if your scans come out murky or off-color, try the "Color Restoration" option, under Image Adjustments in Home Mode. You have to select that option for each frame. But it can make a big difference, even if your negatives aren't old at all.

I bought the 2580 because of the capability to automatically scan 35mm negatives. While it takes some time scanning each frame, loading the negatives in the auto feed is tricky. Sometimes several tries are necessary. However, the most disturbing problem is film jams. After about 50 negative scans a strip jammed in the feeder, requiring a manual removal using the feed knob (underneath the top lid). After removing the film, the auto feed no longer works. Everytime I try, a receive a red alert - Epson calls it a fatal error. I'm pursuing with customer service, but this doesn't sound good. Perhaps another brand would work better.

I was scanning in 35mm with my HP 5530 which HP so notabable disctontinued 2 weeks after my purchase. Worked great until I ran across a project with my Aunt who handed me well over 2000+ negatives. It wasn't something I really wanted to do, but 30+ years of negatives was exciting. Some big memories have emerged.

After a few nights of messing around with the HP and trying to locate an additional plastic mount the last few months and finding out I couldn't even purchase it from HP, well, I knew this little project was going to take me a "very long time".

I ran across the Epson here on Amazon and Santa got it for me for Christmas. I have to admit, this low profile scanner with the 35mm feed is really "cool". And it gets almost every picture perfect!!!! The autofeed and software are great. Then again, I use JASC Paint Shop Pro to flip and rotate as needed. I'll scan in 4 pictures, reload the scanner with another set of 35mm film, start scanning, hit update thumbnails in JASC, and correct the pic's while the next batch is scanning.

I am almost on picture 500 tonight!!!

Only problem I encountered was a piece of tape got caught in the transfer mech that was attached to the film from the lab but I was able to get it cleaned out and I was back on my way.

I had no problems installing the software or hardware. Make sure you read the instructions and you should have no problems.

GREAT PRODECT EPSON...I THOUGHT I WOULD NEVER PURCHASE SOMETHING LIKE THIS FROM YOU.

You have a new fan.

dave

I just wanted to write an update on my review that I did on December 27.

I have scanned over 2000+ pictures from 35mm film and this thing just keeps on clicking along.

Tricks I learned are to keep the glass cleaned. Use Sparkle!! Spray it on a piece of soft paper towel to clean the glass of dust.

I mentioned before that I used the HP 5530. That scanner is really nice but the software was horrible. I rescanned all of my girlfriends Alaska pictures with the Epson and re-posted them on my website.

To see the quality of this scanner, visit www.davevogt.net, look at Buzz's page, her Alaska pictures and you can see the results of the 35mm scans.

GREAT JOB EPSON!!!!

Unfortunately the very accurate review of 24th Oct was posted after I had ordered this scanner otherwise I would not have. Yes it does take 1 minute per frame so the product description of "digitize and restore stacks of negatives in a few simple steps" though correct, would take a lifetime to actually do. I am going to buy a high speed USB cable to see if that might increase the speed..otherwise can't see myself digitizing anything. Oh well, at least I have a nice document scanner!

I have had this scanner for eight months and have had no problems. The soft ware was easy to install and is very user friendly. This is my fourth scanner in nine years and I find I like it the best of them all. The first two broke down immediately after the warranties were up and would cost more to fix than replace. That is saying something because one was over $300. The third was good, but not like this one. I really like being able to do more with the pictures than crop or remove redeye. It is so easy to resize them and have them remain clear. If you are scanning for personal use, this is a good choice and I highly recommend it.

I bought this scanner with the intention of scanning in all my daughter's wedding negatives. After investing at least five hours muddling around with the inept software that came with the scanner, I finally figured out the non-intuitive method required to save settings and repeat the process of scanning negative strips.

Long story short, after spending dozens of hours more scanning in negatives, I realized every image had a reddish cast to it. Dozens more hours were spent performing color balancing with Adobe Photoshop Elements. As an experiment, I tried scanning in a couple of proof prints and compared those images to the same images scanned from negatives. The proof images were clear and beautifully color balanced, as opposed to the negative images, in which everyone appeared to have a sunburn.

So the moral of the story is this: don't assume images scanned from negatives (at least with this machine) are necessarily superior to print-scanned images. That mistake cost me hundreds of wasted hours. I don't know if the problem was in the negatives themselves (the printed proofs are just fine), or the negative scanner on this machine. But I am extremely disappointed with the results.

I run a graphics studio, and use a scanner several times a day for photos, printed material, even small items such as jewelry that require some depth of field from the scanner. Because we have so much dedicated software that runs native in OS9, we're holding out on the Big Upgrade to OSX as long as we can. Last year I researched a new scanner to buy while we still had a choice of OS9 driver scanners, finally selecting an HP Scanjet 4400c. This was a joy to use, with friendly software, all the options we required, and good scans. Then it started producing banded images, and to make a long story short, this is a defect of some HP scanners, there is no fix, and HP goes out of its way not to help. So here we were in Dec 2005, frantically looking for a new scanner with Mac OS9 drivers.

After asking around amongst my contacts in the graphics and design community, the consensus was that Canon has nice scanners and provides the best software, and that Epson has the worst software, although their scanners are fine. The Canon LiDE 20, 30, or 50 all ran in OS9 , but no store had any stock; they'd been cleaned out months back. All the recent Canons (LiDE 25, 35, 60) only ran under OSX. grrr. Finally, and getting desperate, I tracked down an Epson Perfection 2580 (basically a repackaged 2480), which comes with OS9 drivers, and bought it on the spot, which happened to be Nanaimo BC.

After installing the software and removing enough packing material to insulate a doghouse, I fired it up using the Epson Smart Panel software, and was able to eventually save an image file to a folder on the desktop. Gone is the useful ability I had with the HP to Import directly into Photoshop (I've trolled the net for hours trying to locate an Epson 2480/2580 Photoshop Import plug-in; I might add that I was astonished to find NO reference to Photoshop on Epson's site - did they have a falling-out with Adobe perhaps?). SO I have to save a scan to the Epson desktop folder, and then open that file from within Photoshop, which is tedious and time-wasting. I've also tried just running Epson Scan (which is supposed to simply produce a bare-bones scan), but can't find any way to set resolution, adjust viewing area, change the scan type and so on with this method. The same applies to the "Professional Mode" of the Epson Smart Panel software, although I CAN make some of these adjustments in "Automatic Mode".

What can I say? This software really IS awful, and I'd love to have half an hour alone with whoever designed or approved it, to point this out. It's too bad that Seiko/Epson makes a mechanically decent device, and then cripples users with clumsy, ill-conceived software.

Eventually we'll be forced to upgrade, at which point we'll probably abandon Apple (the Mac OS experience bears little resemblance to its once friendly and open architecture), giving us a wide range of options in software and hardware, and another opportunity to try a Canon scanner.

Bottom line? Nice-looking scans (eventually) of color photos and grayscale images, nice package, front buttons are recessed enough so they're not being accidentally pressed (like the protruding HP buttons) and launching unwanted software, and all the required cables and attachments are included (incredibly, some scanner makers still don't include everything needed to use all the features). The OCR software is a demo, but most bundled software is diluted these days. On the down side, this is a real screecher (the HP was almost silent by comparison) - everyone in the office knows when I'm making a scan! But the real hassle, is NOT having a Photoshop Import plug-in (what were they thinking???), and this tortuous software that takes most of the fun out of scanning. An import plug-in might at least by-pass some of these obstacles. I haven't had a chance to try scanning any 3D objects on the scanner glass so I can't comment on the depth of field this scanner offers. I'll have to gird my loins and face the Epson Smart Panel again I guess...