Customer Reviews

Epson Perfection 2480 Limited Edition Photo Flatbed Scanner with Feeder (B11B172171)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I just bought this scanner, and have only used it a few times, but I'm already blown away by how easy this is to use! Since my first two kids were born before digital cameras, I have boxes of photos to "digitize". This is making very quick work of it. I like the fact that it even accomodates the older square photos from when I was a kid. It has a color restoration feature on it for these older photos, and so far, so good. It quickly and easily converts back to the standard flatbed for bigger photos. I would definetely recommend this to anyone with a large amount of hard copy photos they would like to preserve.

I've tried scanning in all my hard copy photos over the years, but the process of doing so on a traditional flatbed scanner has made the process nearly unbearable.

It's about time that one of the big players released a scanner with auto-feed capability to scan photos effortlessly at a reasonable price.

The scanner itself produces very nice scans and is a compitent piece of hardware. The real gem however is the feeder lid which has made scanning my collection of photos a breeze. No jams, no damage to the photos, and no hassle. Just drop a batch of up to 25 photos in the feed mechanism and go have a snack while the scanner does all the work. The included software does everything you need it to do - adjust color, crop, rotate, or remove red-eye - all with an easy to use interface.

Only downsides were that the installation process was a bit messy (it does the job, but seems to be 4 software installation processes in one) and that the auto-feed mechanism can't accomodate 5x7's.

If you have a bunch of photo albums around and want to take your memories digital, this is the scanner for you.

Got it 2 days ago. Spent the first day playing around with all the settings specific to the feeder (ADF). Now 250 scans into its life I can recommend it just because of this feature. I've looked around for a long time for this kind of features on a scanner; including an obscure scanner called fotofunnel or the trouble ridden HP w/ADF...
anyway other details:
I couldn't get Vuescan to show it's Batch feature. So it's useless for this scanner, though it works for the regular scanning features (maybe it'll be updated soon :). Same thing with Silverfast or what ever its name is.
Out of 300 scans I've had 1 jam and 3 failure to feed (could'nt grab the photo but managed with a little help). The jam was simple; just open the lid and remove the photo that's on the glass and pull back the incoming photo about half an inch. In other words, I'm not too worried about it damaging my photos. One anoyance is that dust accumulates on the glass after a some 40 scans (more or less depending on how clean your pictures are). Good luck with your research. Got to go, about 3000 scans to go.
=======update======
Now on my 2000th scan I can add a few things.
-Some types of Black & White prints fail to feed. So I have to push each one an extra 1/4" for the feeder to grab it; after that all is well.
-You can keep on stacking as it scans but I chose not to do it b/c I'm concerned about overheating something. So I let it rest a minute or less.
-The feeder has a fan that is quite loud. I don't know what it's for but would guess it flattens the photograph to the scanner's glass.
-Warped photos WILL jam inside. Nothing serious, but it interrupts the flow. All of my 25+ year old photos have this problem because they were peeled off albums.
Ok, back to work...

Cropping issues: Any time you manually place a photo on the glass of a scanner, your placement is likely to be rotated slightly. My Canon LIDE 20 software addresses this conservatively, cropping none of the photo, sometimes resulting in a thin wedge of white at the edges. (To remove this, you need to crop it in a photo editor, or re-scan with correct alignment.) This may be the correct implementation for a platen-only scanner, but it can be disappointing when scanning in quantity. Accordingly, the Epson software crops all edges slightly, up to 0.1 inch, in "Full Auto Mode". Also, my test scans on the glass were cropped 0.2 inch (from the 4x6 original) on the edge that I had butted against the front edge of the glass. Butting against an edge is usual, to help get the angle right. Butting against the left edge instead, increased crop on that butted edge to 0.2 inch. My Canon scanner does not have this problem. The Epson 2480 scanner would probably not be my choice, except for the feeder. The crop may be a little less on feeder scans, and does not suffer from a bad edge.

Comparing TIFFs at 600 dpi on screen: I cropped a section out of some scans, and compared them, as well as the originals. The Canon, Epson (glass) and Epson (feeder) scans were all noticeably different. The Epson scans appear square - no noticeable difference depending on orientation of the scan, when then rotated to be the same for display. The scans from the Canon appear to be slightly out of square, but this could be a problem due to the age of the scanner. The Canon scans are softer and brighter, generally having more accurate color on screen, on my test photo. (Auto-levels in PhotoShop Elements 3 made the Epson scans at least as good, on screen.) To me, the Epson (glass) scans were very slightly better than the Epson (feeder) scans, in image quality (colors were the same). In "Full Auto Mode", you don't get to tweak any options that might brighten the images, etc. (It is worth noting that I cannot calibrate my LCD display - your mileage may vary.)

Lower resolution: Epson scans at 400dpi or Canon at 300dpi are perfectly acceptable on screen, hardly distinguishable from 600dpi. Scans of 4x6 prints will never be any better than the print. If you want an 8x12 of comparable quality, you need to go to the negative/slide, a medium that's meant to be enlarged. The negative/slide scanner is suitable only for occasional use, due to lack of Digital ICE. Get your compressed air ready, to clean those things before scanning - and re-scanning! Dust on the negative is a major issue. The quality of the scans is very good.

Print comparison: I usually use a web print service, but I did not have time to wait. On my Canon i950, I printed (1) Canon 600 dpi, (2) Epson feeder 400 dpi, (3) glass 600, (4) feeder 600, (5) feeder 600 with partial auto-levels from PSE. [All were on Canon Photo Paper Pro - I had to re-do two I had done on Plus paper, which was substantially inferior in color.] The only print that we judged acceptable [close enough to the original] was (4) Epson feeder at 600dpi. The others all were inferior in cropping, sharpness, and/or color. The Canon scan had brighter colors than the original, and was a little less sharp. The major cropping of the Epson platen scan, exacerbated by the Canon printing software, resulted in prints that looked less sharp than the feeder print, probably due to stretching to 4x6. The 400 dpi feeder scan was slightly less sharp than at 600dpi, but otherwise the same. We expect better print quality, with a professional print service. [All scans for this test, Full Auto].

Other: "Always use the document table to scan important, valuable, or one-of-a-kind photos.... Dust, friction, or a feed jam may cause damage to the photo... if you load it in the feeder." My test print did eventually get scratched. There is no power switch - you will have to plug and unplug it. (The Canon is USB-powered, making this a non-issue.) When buying a scanner, be willing to pay a little more for a decent return policy - I bought mine at Amazon - they're great!

The Home mode appears useless. In Professional mode, scans require manual cropping, which is relatively easy at scan time. This eliminates the over-cropping problem, at the cost of quite a bit of time. No cropping was needed next to the edge of the glass, indicating a dead space there, though I forgot to check.

Important issue: 4x6 prints are inserted into the feeder 4-inch side first. This results in portrait orientation scans. Landscape (horizontal) scans need attention, to see them sensibly on the computer. Windows XP will rotate these for you, with the click of your mouse. However, if you scan JPEGs, this is a lossy rotation - every time you save a JPEG, you lose something. The compromise proposed by Chris Breeze is to scan TIFFs, rotate them (which is lossless), and then convert them to JPEGs.

I use BreezeBrowser Pro, which will perform lossless rotation of JPEGs. This works great for digicam images, where the image dimensions are usually an exact multiple of the 4/8/16-pixel tile size. However, batch scans from the Epson 2480LE (or most other scanners) do not have these perfect dimensions, so lossless rotation cannot work correctly. Here how I'm getting around this problem:

1. Insert the prints into the feeder face down.

2. Set the scanner to 400 or 600 dpi, for TIFFs, and scan the images to C:\My Pictures\Scans.

3. Fire up BB Pro, go to the Scans folder, highlight all the Landscapes (Ctrl-click as needed) and rotate them 90 degrees in the correct direction. (If the Portraits are 180 degrees off, rotate all pics once, and the Portraits again.)

4. Highlight all the pics. If they are in reverse order, use View - Image Order - Reverse Sort Order. Or, drag & drop as needed, to get the images in the desired order.

5. Use Tools - Batch Rename, As Displayed. I use yyyy-mm-ddd %n name, e.g. 2005-02-23 001 Neat Place.

6. Edit the TIFFs, as needed (select an image, then Ctrl-D, to fire up your configured image editor).

6. Ctrl-A to select all, then Tools - Proofs - Proof Selected, to convert all the images to JPEGs in the Scans\proofs folder (check no boxes). I chose to use 95/100, which resulted in files ranging from 650K to 1.5MB.

7. Delete all the TIFFs (one click) - I set BB Pro so that mine land in a Deleted folder, so I'll have to haul them away later (a real winner, on occasion).

8. Put the JPEGs where I want them....

Bottom line: We decided to keep this scanner. It was a close call, but we have thousands of prints to scan, and there does not seem to be any other affordable option. The Epson 2480LE is definitely at its best for this purpose.

Over the past 5 years, I have been scanning the family's photos. This involved a very manual process of laying out the pics on the scanner (an older epson), and then marking off the prints and scanning them.

I've been looking for an automatic scanner since I began - one with a photo sheet feeder. I've considered a few, but the reviews all seemed to indicate jamming problems.

When I saw this one for $169, I gave it a shot.

It works incredibly well. The photo feeder will pull in up to 24 pics, scan and eject them. You can define the folders and the scan quality for the process. With photos that are in good condition, I have not had a single jam - very impressive.

A number of photos I have were in albums, and after removing them are curled. The feeder did take these in too, but with occassional jamming.

The automatic feeder in general though is very impressive.

The process is not fast - probably about a minute per print. So this is not something to sit and wait for. Do something else and then come back to add prints, or set it up to do a stack at night.

The scan qualities are very good. Color and sharpness are fine. The quality of the scan is dependent on the quality of the original of course, so expectations can't be too high for pics taken 30 yrs ago on 126 cartridge film. (Remember that?)

I've also scanned using the flat bed - this works very well too. If you put multiple prints on the glass, and separate them with some space, the software will recognize them and scan them in as separate images.

Slide scans are very good - but only 2 at a time.

One note - the sheet feeder is an entirely separate cover for the scanner. To switch between flat bed scanning and sheet feeder, you have to switch these covers. Very simple to do though, and not an issue.

Altogether, this is very versatile, with good scan quality and I highly recommend it.

I've scanned about 1,600 pictures with mine, so far. I've had perhaps 5 jams in total, none of which damaged any pictures, and all of which were caused by me trying to get too many pictures in the hopper.

The scanner is fast and as "plug & play" as any device I've ever used with a computer. The feeder won't handle pictures larger than a 5x7, and you can't manually scan pictures without detaching the feeder & reattaching the "normal" top.

I own the HP 5500C and it's been a pain since day one. It jams on nearly every photo. So far I haven't had a single jam from the EPSON. It's mechanism is more solid than the HP and it autodetects and crops the photos correctly unlike the HP. I've owned/used nearly every major brand of scanner out there. The only drawback is that even in automatic mode the scanner prescans the photo and the scans are slower than the HP...but that's the price you pay for having them cropped correctly. Since this item isn't made anymore I would get the new EPSON 3590 and order the photo feeder as an accessory. This gives you automatic film feeding as well as automatic photo feeding. The downside is that they want as much for the photo feeder as they do the scanner.....so buy both. I would give this 5 stars if is scanned a little faster and if it was packaged with the automatic film feeder as well. The included film/slide adapter does do well though.

The automatic photo feeding capability of this scanner makes scanning lots of prints very easy. I bought the scanner two days ago and have scanned in 360 4x6 pics with very little problem. Out of the 360 pics I had no jams, and a few pics that did not scan correctly (mostly this meant that the pic was cropped in some way during the scanning process). Over all I am very pleased with the scanning quaility and speed of this scanner. Epson does warn you about scanning valuable originals as apparently there is a chance for the photo to scratched as it goes through the automatic feeder. I did not experience that problem.

Software is ok. Much better than what comes with the HP Scanjet 4070 and the software was much easier to install.

Do follow the directions that one of the other ppl posted about scanning in pics as a tiff and then using a program to rotate and convert them to jpeg. I used Picasa (free from Google) and it worked fine.

The purpose of buying this product for me was to take advantage of the multi photo scanning ability - in particular I was focused on the photo feeder mechanism which most reviewers said worked pretty well. You must, of course, make sure the photos are clean and the feeder will get tripped up if the photos are bent at all, but this is pretty par for the course as far as feeders go. The feeder works pretty well.

What has gone way beyond my expectations are some cool features on the flatbead scanner. First of all, you can set the scanner for an auto mode and it will automatically detect the kind of document you are scanning and set the save settings accordingly. You can also set these manually, but I have found that unnecessary and love having the ability to scan in random documents (photo, to text, black and white, color) one after the other without messing with anything.

ALSO - this is the coolest - I placed multiple photos on the flatbead scanner and let it go on its auto settings and it AUTOMATICALLY saved each photo as a separate document and cropped the saved images perfectly. I can't tell you how much time this saves me. No more cropping and saving and resizing.

I am very happy with this scanner for my need to scan in and save lots of old photos!!

I have thousands of prints on all manner of different papers. This feeder rarely makes it for more than ten photos before it jams. Still, the scanner and the software are very easy to use, and the software saves each image with an individual file name. So far I have scanned over 1000 pictures since I got the machine last week.

My PC has a 3 Ghz chip and 1 Gig of RAM, and yet the Epson software responds slowly sometimes and seems a little buggy. I also agree with another reviewer's complaint that the Epson software insists on popping windows open on top of whatever else you are working on.

The bottom line is that, when everything is working perfectly, it's a great scanner/software combo for converting your old prints to digital images. Just be prepared to have some patience sometimes.

EDITED AFTER TWO WEEKS TO ADD that the feeder has been working better. Once you get the hang of this thing, you really can just load a bunch of pictures and walk away.