Marvelous Multipurpose Scanner

When I inherited my father's slide collection, I got serious about getting a scanner.

This is the first scanner I've purchased. In fact, this is the first scanner I've used!

I have looked at several scanners and narrowed it down to an HP G4050, Epson V500, and the Canoscan 8800f. .Doing a search on the internet, the Epson Perfection V500 was the only scanner among those three that I could get locally.

So., I chose the Epson Perfecton V500! It took me several hours to get up to speed on this scanner, and I would have liked to have a nice printed manual. Instead, we have another online manual.

● It boasts of 6400 x 9600 dpi for extraordinary enlargements of film.
● Digital ICE Technology to Remove Dust and Scratches.
● Built-in Transparency Unit - Scan Slides and negatives, including medium format.
● Earth-Friendly LED light source that uses less power – no warmup time required.

Software included

● Epson Scan with Epson Easy Photo Fix
● Epson Creativity Suite
● ABBYY Find Reader Sprint Plus OCR
● Adobe Print Shop Elements

Actually, the Epson Scan with Epson Easy Photo Fix is the only software I felt a need to install!

There is also an optional sheet feeder available for $199, for those with lots of documents to copy.

There are four buttons on the front of the machine, PDF, EMail, Print, and Scan.

The PDF produces acceptable images, but it saves them with a filename of whatever you currently have set up in your software. I had Y27-026, and that is what it labeled mine.

The Email, produces a sharp image, but it's in pretty high resolution, some users have complained about not being able to see my images which I've emailed them. But that can be adjusted by changing the size.

I like the fact I can print a few pages, without having to jump in the car and drive to Kinkos. It has a multiple page print or single page ability, and I've found the multiple page mode hard to work when using a lot of copies, because there's a lag between one page and the next, I think it would work better with the optional sheet feeder. Unfortunately, without the sheet feeder option, you're scanning the next page, and the previous page hasn't printed yet, so it gets confusing. So for several pages, I prefer to use the one page at a time mode.

Now to the reason I purchased the scanner, scanning slides. While it scans four slides at once, my father's slides were grouped in batches of 25, so I'd have preferred five slides at a time. But I guess it's this way, because most rolls were either 24 or 36 exposure. The scanning seemed slow to me, but I have no previous experience with a scanner, so no frame of reference.

There are three modes, auto mode, home mode, and professional mode, and I prefer to scan with the professional mode. First, remove the white backing piece, so the top light can shine through the slides. Basically, you lay the slide holder on the scanner, then drop the slides in the slide holder, and it will scan four at once. (Be sure to have the "Thumbprint" checkbox at the bottom of the screen checked, or you'll end up seeing one huge image of four slides. In fact, this is probably the most helpful part of this review, because it too, me lots of try and error to discover this.)

I scanned my slides at various resolutions, but finally settled on 1200, since I planned to use them in my Gadget, and printing to 3 x 5" prints looked fine.

In Automode, you may scan without any settings or preview screen, you can only scan 35mm color negative film strips or color positive slides.

File formats include: BIT (*.bmp), JPEG (*.JPG), Multi-TIFF (*.TIF), PDF (*.PDF), PICT (*.PCT) Macintosh Only, PRINT Image Matching II JPEG or TIFF, TIFF (*.TIFF)

Check boxes allow you to overwrite any files with the same name. Show dialog box before next scan, open image folder after scanning.

In Home or Professional Mode, you may either preview normal to preview images (about 4" x 2 ½" inches) in their entirety, or you must select scan area and make any image quality adjustments manually. I would prefer the preview screen to be larger. In Thumbnail preview your preview images are displayed as thumbnails, so there's even less detail. In slide mode, Epson Scan automatically locates the edges of the scan area and applies exposure settings to the images. With my 35 mm slices it would automatically select the proper size, but with my 110 color slides and negatives, I had to crop each image individually.

There are several color and images settings available:

Color Restoration: Home & Professional, Restores the colors in faded photos automatically.
Dust Removal: Professional Only, removes dust mares from originals automatically. (Results do not appear in the preview, only the scanned image.)
Backlight Correction: Home and Professional, Removes shadows from photos that have too much background light. In Professional mode, the level is adjustable.
Grain Reduction: Professional Only, Reduces the effect of surface roughness from film and slides.
Digital ICE Technology and Digital ICE Lite Technology: Home and Professional. Removes dust or scratch marks from color film or slide images. (Does not work with dust correction).
Brightness: Home & Professional. Adjusts overall image lightness & darkness.
Contrast: Home and Professional: Adjusts differences between light and dark areas of overall image.
Saturation: Professional Only: Adjusts Density of Colors in Overall Image
Color Balance: Professional Only: Adjusts the balance of red, green and blue colors in the overall image.
Auto Exposure: Home and Professional. Adjustable in Professional Mode.
Unsharp Mask: Home and Professional. Adjustable in Professional Mode.
Histogram: Professional Only. Provides a graphical interface for adjusting highlight, shadow and gamma levels individually.
Tone Correction: Professional: Provides a graphical interface for adjusting tone levels individually.
Color Palette: Professional Provides a graphical interface for adjusting mid-tone levels, such as skin tones, without affecting the highlight and shadow areas of the image.
Threshold: Home and Professional: Adjusts the level at which the black areas in text and line art are delineated.



After scanning several hundred slides, I come up with the following system. Wipe off the slides with a microfiber cloth. Wipe the scanner with the microfiber cloth. I scan on Professional mode, checking all the boxes possible. I started using Dust Removal, but found about 30 percent of the time, I'd have to rescan in Digital ICE mode. So, I chose Digital ICE if I saw any visible dust or imperfections or blue sky. And just about all my slides get color corrected as well as Backlight Corrected.

After seeing my results, verses other scanning results on dedicated slide scanners, I find mine look sharper and brighter!

One last note. While there are probably better slide scanners available, including those with slide feeders, I came to the decision I wanted a flatbed scanner, because once we run out of slides, I would have a rather expensive paperweight. This scanner also converts to PDF, scans to eMail and also prints.

Our bank is on the cutting edge, and imagine my delight when I learned I can use my scanner scan and send deposits to my bank! I scan my check into the system, and the money appears in my account immediately!

This is a wise investment!