Scans like a pro, love the software options.

We purchased this scanner for my office a few weeks ago and when it came in I was really excited. We don't do a lot of scanning and the only reason we picked up a scanner this nice was because it was being covered by the university life cycle upgrade program.

The first thing I did was scan a couple random documents just to see how they would look. Now here I ran into something a little strange. The scanner made some very unpleasant clicking and grinding noises, but it seemed to scan perfectly. I was a little bit concerned about this. So I asked the tech about it and we figured out it was the lock on the scanner. I have a scanner at home, but it is rather old, so I was unfamiliar with this "scanner locking" mechanism. This scanner was also unusual since it is a film scanner as well as a flatbed in that it had two locks. The first lock you have to undo to even plug the USB in. The lock for the top light is very easy to miss. Now I being a big bad man, set this thing up with no instructions. So I don't want to blame this one entirely on Epson, but I'm a little concerned that the Epson would scan at all with the lock in place. A small sensor wouldn't up the price that much, and it would potentially prevent breaking a perfectly good scanner over trying to force the mechanisms to work when they aren't supposed to.

That aside, this baby scans at several thousand dpi. I was able to scan negatives and have it automatically invert the color, and they were crisp and beautiful when printed out on a full 8.5*11 sheet of paper at 300 dpi print resolution. I was only doing a fraction of the dpi the scanner is actually capable of when I did these scans, and they scanned very quickly. I would like it if there had been a black plastic plate to put on the scanning surface to block out the glass area not usable for slide scanning. The slide scanning light is not as wide as the full area and you kind of have to guess where the scanable area ends and begins. There is also no edge to push your media up against to make sure it is square.

The software defaults to the consumer "auto detect every setting under the sun" mode. I personally hate this mode for all scanners, but unlike HP where it can be very difficult to keep the software from making assumptions you don't want it to, there is a very simple drop down box at the top of the interface that allows you to move into "Professional Mode". This mode has every setting you could possible want, and gives you all the power you could want. I haven't enjoyed a scanning interface this much since the old Microtek scanning interface from windows 98. When I upgraded to 2000 and downloaded my Microtek drivers the interface was considerably slimmed down and less powerful.

I have only done a couple color test scans as the work I'm doing personally is with black and white negatives, but the color test scans I've done have been exceptionally vibrant. I can also say that I was very impressed with the scanning speed at print resolutions. All in all using this scanner has been a delightful experience.