Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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320 of 322 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It's doing the job, but..., January 21, 2007
I bought this scanner a month ago to scan the several thousand slides I have taken over the past years. I'm not a professional photographer - my expectations were only to digitize my slides to the same quality as the photos I have been taking with my 7mp digital camera. After receiving the scanner (which set up easily) I did an extensive set of tests to determine the appropriate settings (resolution, compression, etc), and then set about scanning my slides.
Now that I am 2/3 done with the task I can say that it's working OK, but there are goods and bads. I have no experience with other film scanners so I can't say how this unit compares to others, but here's what I have learned:
* Many have complained about the flimsiness of the plastic slide holder. Mine has held up fine so far, but I can find no information anywhere about how I would get a replacement if I broke the one that came with the scanner, which concerns me a little.
* Epson's web site is not very helpful. They have a simple FAQ with some basic items, but nothing really helpful, and no discussion groups. You are on your own.
* As others have commented, the included software is pretty basic, but I think it gets the job done. It has at least 2 very annoying flaws, though. One is that every time I preview scan another set of 12 slides, it turns off the dust removal and/or digital ICE selection. This means that you need to remember to turn it back on with every scan, which I have forgotten to do some times. There appears to be a way of saving your settings, but even that gets reset on every scan, so is useless. Maybe there is a way to make this work right, but the sparse documentation yields no clues.
* Another software issue is its ability to recognize the vertical or horizontal orientation of slides. Mostly it does a really good job with this, but sometimes it guesses wrong, e.g. it will think a slide is vertical when it actually is horizontal. Usually this happens if the slide has a dark background. Unfortunately when it guesses wrong, it crops off the sides or the top/bottom of the picture, so you can't just rotate it 90 degrees. Most of the time when I notice a wrong guess I have been able to correct it by rotating the slide 90 degrees and re-previewing, but I have several slides where it simply insists on getting it wrong and the software provides no way to override this behavior. A related bad behavior occurs if you have a slide that has a bright rectangle on a dark background, e.g. a shot of TV screen - in that case, it tries to zoom in on part of the picture, cropping off much of it including even some of the light area. I can find no way to defeat this behavior, so apparently the only remedy is to crop this type of image manually, which is going to be very labor intensive.
* Another problem relates to a hardware design flaw that I am very surprised that no one has mentioned. After scanning my first several batches of slides and examining the results carefully, I went into a mode of scanning without taking the time to examine every resulting image. After scanning a LOT of slides, I started reviewing the results and was horrified to notice that on certain batches, there were 2 faint vertical lines (one green, one blue) down certain scans. I finally noticed that the lines seemed to be on 4 consecutive slides out of every 12 (the slide holder contains 12 slides), so that was a clue. Notice that the top of the scanner has a transparent slit down the middle - apparently this is a sexy feature so you can see where the scanner light is and watch its motion. Well, it also admits other light into the scanner, at least under certain ambient light conditions, ruining the scans of the 4 slides in the middle column. I fixed this by taping a piece of cardboard to the top of the scanner. And now I have to re-scan a lot of messed-up images.
* I really can't notice that the Digital ICE feature does anything except quadruple the amount of time it takes to scan each set of slides. I tried doing scans with it and without it, and can notice little difference. Not much of a problem, since I the Epson software de-selects the option to use it after each preview scan as mentioned above.
* I suppose it's not really a fault of the scanner, but watch out for dust! It's really important to blow off your slides before every scan, and also the scanner glass. Despite being really careful, I still have a big issue with dust. Would have been nice if Epson had included a brush and something to blow with (I got a squeeze bulb blower that helps a lot). When I am done with my scanning project I'm considering replacing the electronic air cleaner in my home with this unit, since it seems to be a dust magnet! :-)
* One last comment. This is not a general-purpose scanner, i.e. you really wouldn't want to use it as a document scanner, mainly because every time you want to use it, it needs to warm up for a minute. Fortunately I have another scanner for documents, and it works instantaneously.
It's possible that some of the items above are user error on my part, but with the meager documentation and web site, it's hard to develop a detailed understanding of the unit without a lot of experimentation, which might cause one to miss something. Your mileage might vary.
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182 of 184 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
exceeded my expectations, May 3, 2006
I have a large collection of slides shot in the past 20 years. Lots of good shots on FujiChrome100 and Velvia50. In the past I've had a tough time getting good prints from them from regular photo labs, and pro printers cost too much.
I have experience with an older Nikon slide scanner, and I am getting much better results from the Epson V700 bed scanner. I see image improvements to 6400dpi, I scan to tiff at 48bit using the Epson software, then adjust color and contrast in photoshop cs2. I get very good results even from some warped slides where I always had focus problems when printed in the lab. Its very exciting to see these pictures again.
Despite good reviews of this feature, I have yet to find an acceptable result from the included automatic dust removal, both hardware and software based. The dust is gone, replaced by strange pixelation. Much better to remove the dust by hand using the CS2 repair tool, which works like magic for me. After dust removal I increase sharpness using smart sharpening, and save to jpg. Its amazing the detail that emerges with a little sharpening. Resultant jpg is 20-35megs, but is compatible with local printer's fuji frontier printer. With the control I get from manipulating and color-converting the digital image, I get prints that come out exactly as I like, better than any enlarger-based print I've ever obtained.
I won't claim the v700 will scan better than a modern slide scanner because I've never used one, but the results I get are certainly better than I expected. It is surprising to me that these slide prints are on par with what I get from my nikon d70.
Bed scanning of slides is pretty fast, about 45 minutes to scan 12 slides when scanning to my pentium m laptop. It take about a minute to put the old slides away and plop new ones into the holder.
Installation was super easy. Just install driver, plug in, start scanning. But the documentation isn't so good. There is a lot involved in getting a good scan, its sort of an art. You'll need to read a bunch on the internet. When you first get the printer, play with all the settings, scan the same slide over and over with different slide-height settings, resolutions,etc, until you find what works for you. Have an idea what you want to see, then try stuff and see if you can make it happen. Like I said above, the auto dust removal might be convenient, but the results won't withstand close scrutiny. Ditto for the scanning software based "color restoration", "sharpening", or anything else. Just post-process the 48bit tiff in photoshop.
I played around with the included silverfast SE scanning software, but found the interface clunky and there was no functional improvement over the included epson software, so I don't use it. The included detailed scan manipulation functions are all available in photoshop, so I don't bother.
When scanning photos (as opposed to film or slides), the resolution makes a huge difference. Some resultions will alias the print pattern. Getting a good scan from a print requires patience.
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55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Epson Perfection Scanner, July 3, 2006
Outstanding product quality, but it takes work to get the best out of it.
We bought this scanner to use mainly for scanning medium format film.
The scanner resolution is excellent, and the ability to scan in 16 bit mode provides extended dynamic range and ability to capture subtle tone details. However, achieveing this always requires changing the default exposure levels, particularly on the low end of the scale. A limitation of the software, however, is that the histogram tool for setting the levels always shows the scale in a linear 8 bit mode (0 to 255 levels), whereas a log scale or optical density scale would probably be more appropriate for 16 bit scans. Photshop also does not have this feature but would benefit from it.
A more troubling problem we have experienced is that all our film scans require changing the gamma of the blue channel significantly in order to achieve color balance. Once we had that figured out, the results have been excellent.
The software documentation is pretty lame, as usual.
As far as film handling goes, the slide holders seem adequate, but the film holders feel like they are going to break every time you use them. The medium format holder only holds the film by the long edges, which doesn't provide much support. One solution for this would be to improvise a filmholder which is like an enlarger holder in that it clamps the film on opposite sides of the image. The Epson filmholders have holes in them that the scanner uses to detect the holder type, and the software does a good job of detecting the borders of each image and presenting them all to you in the preview window.
Despite these nit-picks, this scanner is an excellent value. The scans we are getting off of Fuji Velvia 100 are breathtaking. I hope that the availability of these will renew interest in medium and large format film, as these offer creative options which are impossible with digital cameras.
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