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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating : - NICE unit! ...but not too speedy...
The Epson V500 Photo scanner is an extremely nice unit. It accommodates photographs, 35mm color negatives and B&W negatives, 35mm mounted slides, large format negatives, and documents up 8.5" x 11" and A4-sized sheets.
The scanned images are awesome! I am extremely pleased with the job this scanner does with my old 35mm mounted slides. I've also had great success scanning old family photos.
Here's how the scanner works:
First of all you must install the scanner software that accompanies this unit. Once you have done that the scanner can be attached to the computer via a USB line. Turn on the scanner's power switch, click on the "Epson scan" icon on your computer desktop, and select the mode that best matches your level of comfort and ability.
The scanner has three main functional modes: 1) Full Automatic, 2) Home, and 3) Professional.
If you are just getting started in the scanning world, select the "Full Auto Mode", place a document, photo, etc., that you want to scan on the glass scanning surface, click the "scan" icon on the Epson scan window and sit back and wait for the results to show up on screen.
Oh, this scanner comes with a set of plastic frames that includes openings that hold up to four mounted slides or up to two strips of six negatives each.
If you are a little more adventurous and want some additional control over the output image you can move up to the "Home mode". This setting lets you choose the document type (photograph, photo negative, magazine page, etc.), the image type (color, grayscale, black and white), and a limited number of image adjustments. FYI - "Digital Ice" technology that automatically optimizes the image, corrects scratches, etc., is available only for photos and photo negatives.
If you want complete control over the the output image, select the "Professional mode." This setting allows you full flexiblity in choosing scanner settings, including sharpness, color, auto-exposure, histogram adjustment, tone correction, color palette access, grain reduction for high speed films, backlighting correction, dust removal, and Digital Ice optimization. Again, remember that the Digital Ice option is available only for photographs, and photo negatives and positives.
The unit looks nice and has a relatively small footprint. That's good because there's not much room on my computer desk.
I have used similar scanners before, and I found the functionality of this model to be quite intuitive.
In addition, the Epson V500 scanner comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. This versatile image manipulation program can be used to work with your images once they are digitized.
I do have a couple of minor complaints about this unit. First, I don't find this unit to be particularly speedy. For example, it takes 45 seconds for this unit to scan an 8.5" x 11" document and generate an image. It takes the unit about 3.5 minutes to scan four slides and generate their images. So, if you are going to be scanning lots of documents or slides, etc., I recommend that you have a book in hand to flip open once you hit the "scan" button. Second, the Digital Ice setting works only with photographs and photonegatives.
All in all, this is a sweet little unit, and it should meet most people's scanning needs.
For the reasons listed above I give this scanner a solid 4-star rating.
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