Customer Reviews

Epson Perfection 3490 Photo Scanner

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased this scanner for two purposes. Firstly I wanted to scan old decaying family photos and archive them on the computer. Secondly I wanted to digitally archive home office paperwork to save space. I have to say this product does both of these functions flawlessly.

This scanner has more than enough resolution for scanning prints. Keep in mind that nearly all prints have less than 300dpi (dots per inch). So if you are scanning prints or text it is really pointless to have a more expensive higher resolution scanner.

On the front of the scanner there is a PDF button, copy button, and email button. The copy button worked fantastic in conjunction with my Dell laser printer for quick sharp copies. The PDF button simply puts the image into a PDF file that allow you to continue scanning into the same PDF document. I have not used the email button.

Overall you a fantastic scanner for the money.

For the price you pay for the Epson Perfection 3490, you acheive great results. It's capable of produce very fine quality digital images, and it's quick enough for me. The included software makes it very easy to auto scan with preset options, or allows you to decide all the options and get exactly the kind of image you need. Great buy!

At under $100, this scanner was a great buy for me. I wanted to scan my slides and negatives and needed to replace my old HP Photosmart Slide scanner (2400 DPI) which uses a SCSI card with ISA slot and is not possible to use with my new computer.

The delivery from Amazon was fast and I was impressed with the looks - solid and smooth. The Epson scan software was nice too with all the standard histogram and curves controls. Unfortunately, the Photo Impression software was not up to mark, as it crashed a couple of times and then I discarded it. I never used the Bizcard tool.

However, I soon realised it will never replace a standard slide scanner. The scans of Slides at 3200 DPI produce JPEG files of size only 700 KB. It must be doing a lot of compression, as my 5 MegaPixel camera produces 2MB JPEG images. There is no option of getting an uncompressed scan. Also it auto detects the slide frames and that crops the frames sometimes. But there is no option of selecting the frames myself, which the HP software had. Scans are noisy and the scanner takes much longer time than the HP, which used to take about 1 min per frame, and this takes 4 min per scan at full resolution.

I gave 3 stars as although it takes good scans, there is a lot more data that can be extracted from the slides to get a great scan (not the ultimate scan that can be extracted from a Nikon Slide Scanner). But at this price not much more can be expected from the hardware, although some improvements can be expected from the software.

After reading numerous positive reviews of this scanner, both on Amazon and elsewhere, I decided to get it to do film negative scanning at home. So far I've been very happy with it. I just have a few warnings/caveats for others:

1. Having a cat, I have major dust problems in the house. You may think your flatbed scanner is clean, but when scanning 24mm x 36mm film negatives at 2400DPI you find a different story. Keep a can of compressed air around just like you were in the dark room developing prints.

2. The negative scanner works by inserting your negatives into a special removable holder that you place on the flatbed, and the hood contains a strip of backlighting. I cut all my negatives into strips of 5 frames, to fit my 5x7 film negative holding sheets. The maximum number of frames you can scan at once, however, is 4. This means that I have to insert the film one way, scan those, and then pull the negatives and reinsert to scan the last one. Often the fifth photo isn't worth scanning, but perhaps you're a better photographer than me.

3. The scanning software itself is not very adept at autodetecting frame edges. I'm not really sure why it would cut a 24mm x 36mm negative down any smaller, but time and time again it does that. The only way I've found around this is to scan in "normal" mode, which scans the entire strip of 4 frames into one image file which I then have to cut into different files in Photoshop.

It's a great, cheap way to get my film pictures into digital form. Instead of developing prints expensively (time- and money-wise), I can get a roll of C-41 film developed in one hour to negatives only for $2.00 at CVS, go home and cut them and have them scanned in far less than an hour.

We replaced a Microtek x6el with this scanner. I have no complaints it copies, scans, and no hardware conflicts like I had with the Microtek. A great scanner for the price.

I check out a number of the reviews on scanners and finally decided on this one. I'm glad I did. The scanner works great, easy to use, and was priced well. My favorite feature: the software that comes with it lets you scan multiple pictures at the same time and it automatically recognizes each of them separately. This saves a ton of time. I load up anywhere from 4-10 pictures and hit scan. Done!

The scanner does everything advertised and I am quite pleased with its reproduction clarity of even improperly exposed slides.

I have hundreds of slides that need to be catalogued and saved from fading to red. Now, with this scanner, the slides are being turned into digital images that can be saved on a CD without any trouble. Color, clarity and detail is terrific. This is a good tool and does what it says it can do.

Pretty good quality scans. The holder for scanning in film negatives works pretty well. Though you can only scan in 4 or 5 at a time. It is a bit noisy though.

Having had enough of spyware, viruses, security breaches and now rootkits under Windows, I have long since made the difficult transistion to Linux. I am, to say the least, very happy with Linux but not as happy with hardware vendors unwilling to make accommodations for this very popular operating system. So when I began to research flatbed scanners to digitize all my father's (and many of my own) slides, I found it difficult to decide which scanner to buy, and not a lot of information on the web. Almost no scanner manufacturers bother to make their products work under Linux. Reviews tend to be negative; people that are satisfied don't seem to be as willing to share their experiences as people who have a gripe. I have a lot of slides and not a big budget, so I needed a cheap scanner that would give me good results and it had to work under Linux. The Epson 3490 fits the bill perfectly. Sure, it's not speedy, but I get great results right out of the box. Epson has made a fine effort to make their products work with Linux. This to me identifies Epson as one of the minority of hardware vendors truly on the cutting edge and willing to innovate. You will not find all the bells and whistles in Epson's software when working under Linux (we are used to that), but you will find a solution that "just works" and that is thanks to truly impressive engineering from a truly impressive company. This little scanner is great, and while I don't know, I'll bet it works great under Windows too. Highly recommended.