Customer Reviews
Good quality scanning; software limitations detract
Good points:
-Easy install and set-up.
-The software applications authored by other companies (Photoshop Elements, BBYY Sprint OCR and Presto BizCard) is decent to excellent.
-Very high quality TIFF scanning of photos.
-Quieter than any other scanner I've owned (this is #4).
-Fast direct to PDF scanning from a front panel button.
-Decent old/scratched/dusty photo repair capability.
-Relatively speedy processing.
Bad points:
-The EPSON-provided software is generally functional enough, but has some goofy quirks.
--MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR flaw: Under Windows XP, the front panel email button (and its associated "Attach to Email comonent of the "Epson Creativity Suite") supports ONLY Outlook Express, Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002. If you use Outlook 2003, Mozilla or Thunderbird, this button and the application are simply non-functional. There is simply no excuse for such a limited set of supported email applications. Epson should be ashamed of itself. Worse still, this limitation is buried in the program's "read me" text file, and not addressed anyhwere in the HTML help files. Front panel buttons should be widely supported!
--The file saving location settings are not persistent and the "Full Automatic", "Professional" and "Home" modes have some very non-intuitive options for many features and for saving multiple configurations.
-Documentation issues. There is a printed setup poster. Everything else is in HTML files.
Overall: A fine piece of harwdare with excellent output. Good affilate software. Not so good Epson software.
Won't Work with OSX and iMac G5
I have an iMac G5 running OSX.4.4- and the computer could NOT recognize the scanner- not even through Image Capture. I spent hours with Epson support and on the Apple discussion boards, and still got error message saying "Epson scanner unexpectedly quit." Took it back today for a CanoScan 8400F- and in minutes was up and scanning.
Cranky software, but great scans
I read the hit or miss quality reviews about the slide and neg scans and want to report that all of my slides and neg scans look just terrific. This is the best consumer slide scanner I have used to date and I would venture to say that some of the neg scans are as good as what I have gotten from some professional houses. I'm getting great detail in the shadows and coupled with Photoshop have managed to restore a number of images that I thought were goners.
The software is a little cranky and the auto framing is really nice to have when it decides to work. I wish it scanned faster, but at this price, I consider it a good deal. It's better than a simple document scanner and has higher resolution than a lot of image scanners. Now that I have used it do I think it's worth the money? Yes.
