brad's Experience

Howdy doody, folks. That's a question. You're supposed to answer (e.g. Great! Never Better! Been to hell and back!). Kidding. I'll get serious.

I bought this scanner about a month ago off Epson's clearance rack. For those who aren't familiar, Epson has a clearance store at their website and if you're ever looking for any of the things they make, check that out. I got this professional-grade scanner for $89 shipped. It is refurbished, but that just means somebody bought it and returned it and never used it (essentially). What I received looked like brand new.

I'll get to the specs in a minute, but in short, this thing performs like a champ. This is the first decent scanner I have had in maybe ten years. I have been trying to get by on the cheap with these USB-powered scanners or cheap scanners for the past couple of attempts; this time I decided I was going to get something with some power. Epson had this deal and so I bought it.

Prior to owning this scanner, I have had two Visioneers, one HP scanner, and a Canon. The latest was a Canon LiDe 25 which upon gazing was a beauty - short and slim - but was USB 1.1 powered (even as of 2005) and was ridiculously slow. Excruciatingly slow. I wrote a review of it and people told me how stupid I was for failing to check the specs before I bought. Thanks Canon for saving 15 cents per scanner to make that LiDe 25 model by using USB 1.1. I'm sure your Goodwill column on the balance sheet is doing quite well as a result!

Before I go further I may as well lay out the specs so those interested can compare. These are extracted from Epson's website:

Scanner Type
* Flatbed color image scanner with Digital ICE™ Technology for Film

Photoelectric Device
* Color Epson MatrixCCD™ line sensor

Optical Resolution
* 4800 dpi

Hardware Resolution
* 4800 x 9600 dpi with Micro Step Drive™ technology

Maximum Resolution
* 12,800 x 12,800 dpi with software interpolation

Effective Pixels
* 40,800 x 56,160 (4800 dpi)

Color Hardware Bit Depth
* 48-bits per pixel internal, 48-bits per pixel external (External bit depth is selectable to 48 bits depending on the image editing software.)

Grayscale Hardware Bit Depth
* 16-bits per pixel internal, 16-bits per pixel external (External bit depth is selectable to 16 bits depending on the image editing software.)

Optical Density
* 3.4 Dmax

Transparency Unit
* 2.7" x 9.3" Transparency Adapter built-in lid, 12 35mm negative, 4 35mm slide, 1 2-1/4", 6x12cm or 120/220mm (medium format) capacity

Buttons
* 4 buttons; Scan, Copy, E-mail, PDF

Maximum Read Area
* 8.5" x 11.7" (21.6cm x 29.7cm)

Interface
* Hi-Speed USB 2.0

Scanning Speed
* 4800 dpi high-speed mode: Monochrome 16.96 msec/line; Full color 16.96 msec/line

Windows Requirements
* IBM® compatible PC with Pentium® II equivalent or higher processor. USB: Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows Me or Windows XP Home Edition/XP Professional. Hi-Speed USB 2.0: Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Home Edition/XP Professional. 128MB RAM (512MB recommended for Digital ICE), 350MB of available hard disk space minimum (1GB recommended for Digital ICE), CD-ROM drive (4x or faster), available USB connection (Hi-Speed USB 2.0 recommend for optimum performance).

Macintosh Requirements
* iMac® or any G3 or later with built-in USB. USB: Mac OS X 10.2.x and OS 10.3.x. Hi-Speed USB 2.0: Mac OS X 10.2.7 or later. 128MB RAM (512MB recommended for Digital ICE), 450MB of available hard disk space minimum (1GB recommended for Digital ICE), CD-ROM drive (4x or faster), available USB connection.

Physical Dimensions
* Width: 10.71" (272mm), Depth: 18.7" (475mm), Height: 4.5" (113mm), Weight: 9.1 lb (4.113 kg approx.)

Software
* Adobe® Photoshope® Elements, ABBYY® FineReader® Sprint Plus OCR, Epson Creativity Suite, NewSoft™ Presto!® BizCard, Epson Scan with Epson Easy Photo Fix™ Technology

Warranty
* One year limited warranty in the U.S. and Canada

All right, through with that. The biggest hurdle here is finding a computer that is IBM compatible (joke). Relax Mac fans, Epson never forgets us.

So as you can see, this thing uses a good old-fashioned AC adapter for power. Good thing, because I am an old-fashioned sort of guy. The reason this is important is because I think any scanner that is USB-powered is junk. There just isn't enough power in current USB standards to provide the power to drive the scanner and simultaneously transfer all the bandwidth. If it was Firewire, that would be another story.

The other linchpin here is that it's USB 2.0 for transferring the content. There's just no comparison amongst a USB 2.0 scanner and a USB 1.1 scanner. You may ask if I am crazy for even bringing this up, but the last time I thought people had forgotten about USB 1.1, I bought a scanner that is the biggest piece of junk hardware I've had in a while, and as of this weekend, it now resides in a barrel headed to the landfill.

So plenty of power.

Scanners are fairly simple devices so I shouldn't have to go much further, but I will.

Another thing I like about this scanner is that its lid flips up in a cocked position so I can more readily feed documents. You can buy an optional feeder for this thing but obviously if you're looking for that, you're probably looking at a whole other class of scanners. While this one is probably on the fringe of "professional-grade" scanners, it's no SCSI scanner or of that ilk. Anyhow, I like how I can just flip up the lid on this thing and put in documents and not have to worry about holding up the lid while putting stuff in there. It makes the process more fluid as I scan larger projects.

Buttons. There are four buttons on the front and yes Mac fans, they work! We Mac fans have suffered in the past without the full functionality of so-called "one touch" scanners (Visioneer, are you listening?). So yeah, the buttons on the front of the scanner actually trigger corresponding functions on the computer and you're rolling.

Software. Because I use a Mac, I don't need the garbage that came bundled with this thing. That's for you folks who buy $300 Dells and expect things to "just work." Did Apple copyright that phrase?

That being said, as with any scanner you need the basic scanning interface on the computer. Epson's included suite is marvelous. So many options, very intuitive. Just well done stuff. You can tweak the settings to any such desire. I did some of that, but I have it on full auto mode right now. It automatically recognizes the size of a 3x5 photo, for example (forgive me if what I am saying sounds like stuff you heard five years ago. I haven't had a decent scanner in longer than...I had a punchline but I'm not going to write it. Fill in your own blanks). Anyhow, with the included suite, which I don't know but think it's Java, or at least it acts like Java, the little windows pop up in their own little world and you wouldn't know you're using anything comprehensive. The experience isn't overwhelming, if that makes sense.

Craftsmanship. I won't say that this thing is heavy-duty, but it's a nice machine. For MSRP of $400 (it's still listed as a current model at Epson's website), it should be. I'm not worried about this thing coming apart. The screen for the film is rather flimsy, but I don't plan on doing much retrieving of film negatives and scanning those. At least I know this thing is capable of doing that, or so the manual says. All pictures my family takes are now digital and have been for at least three years, so if there are film negatives around, I'll be shocked if I see them.

I do have another Epson product at another location - one of those all-in-ones. That machine is also very nice and I love that thing also (wrote a review of it here). Over the years, Epson has been great to me. The times I have avoided them have been mostly over price, but Epson sort of has an image problem - PR-wise - where their products aren't flashy and they don't effectively advertise them. Check out shelf space at big box stores and Epson doesn't have a presence. I guess when I've bought printers and scanners over the past several years, I have looked at other brands - HP and Canon in particular.

All in all, this is a great scanner. I love it. It is so nice to finally, finally have a nice scanner here in the house so I can get those paper documents out and digitized. I've done about 12 hours of scanning since I received this thing and so I'm about scanned out for now. But I am so glad this problem is behind me for now.

I highly recommend the Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner.

Yours, brad.