Pretty good, but not as great as I first thought

I bought this as it was A-listed (best flatbed scanner) in the UK's PCPro Magazine.

I bought it just for scanning some old photos in print, negative and slide formats, and this ticked all those boxes, as well as offering excellent quality. And, in comparison to that review, it's been.... OK.

I hadn't appreciated this before, but it does strike you when you scan what looks like a perfectly good photo, that there are in fact dust, scratches, etc. on them. While you don't notice from looking at the photo, the light from a typical scanner reflects off dust, and you see it much clearer on the scanned image.

To counter this, the Epson, in 'Professional' mode, has 5 quality improvement settings. Each does make a discernable impact, and most have different strength of effect that you can pick (eg. Maximum dust removal removes dust noise, but can also remove fine detail). These settings (for glossy photos) are:

Unsharp Mask
Descreening
Colour Restoration
Backlight Correction
Dust Removal

Descreening removes patterns inherent in material, like newspaper fibre. Colour Restoration enhances contrast on faded photos, or photos on cheap film. Backlight Correction basically brightens the photo, and Dust Removal, I've mentioned.

Since they all give noticeable improvements, I do turn them all on. However, I still notice poorer quality when compared to basic digital shots - there is often still dust noise (I find it helps to brush the photos with a lens brush first). Colour correction conversely leads to slighty garish contrast, etc.

Now, of course, this is all software correcting for the photo's shortcomings - dust is a fact of life. But the fact that general quality of the scanned photo before correction looks worse than the one I'm holding in my hand... isn't that poor exposure, colour matching, etc. in the scanner?

So - it looks like the scanner alone doesn't give you the photo that you're holding in your hand. It's only because I trust PCPro reviews so much that I assume this is a general problem in scanning photos, and I assume that other scanners would be worse.

Similarly - I'm scanning 5x5 and 5x7 photos at 2400dpi, to try and create reasonable resolution images for re-printing. However, it seems for anything over 300dpi (on a photo, not an A4 page!) doesn't really add any more detail. Obviously it depends on the quality of the paper/film, but I would have thought there's more detail in the printed image.


Likewise for film and slides - they give reasonable results, but not stunning results. What's the point of the Epson being capable of tens of thousands of DPI, if anything over 300 is useless?


But the more annoying thing, is that despite being a mid-range scanner, it's slow and unreliable. The automatic feeder in the film scanner is cool, but one in three times, it'll mis-recognise the images, so I see a preview of half of two images, with the bar in-between.

While I'm writing this, I'm scanning 6 x 5x5" pictures at 2400dpi, with all correction on. It's scanning each image twice, probably once for sampling to choose correction setings, and once for scanning. But: I started this review on picture 2, and it's now on picture 5 - it's taken half an hour for 6 photos, on a 2x2.3GHz CPU laptop with 3Gb RAM over USB 2.0. Including the preview stage where I marked out the photos, and choosing the correction for each photo, it's been 40 minutes.

Likewise, scanning 4 frames of a negative takes around 12 minutes, plus 3 for the preview and settings. In both cases, assuming the autoloader works, then once you've hit scan, there's nothing more to do.


On the plus side...? Well, I can assume the images are better quality than I'd get with other scanners? The auto-correction settings are handy, and do work pretty well. The software's not bad - when it previews negatives, it'll detect the frames and show a separate window for each.

However - I thought I'd bought the best, and it seems I hadn't.