Epson Perfection V300 Film Scanner (35 mm), Flatbed Scanner

So, I had this idea in the back of my mind that I should digitize all my thousands of old 35mm slides. I had researched scanner products and had always heard the Epson's mentioned with positive reviews.

I must say that I had at the back of my mind a project I did many years back where I digitized some old slides at work for a class I was teaching. In those days, my work location had acquired a Nikon CoolScan slide scanner, very expensive. The scanning of the slides was so painfully that I avoided that tool ever since. It was so-o-o slow - about 10 minuted per slide! The scans were good - just difficult to go through.

So I finally said to myself that things must be better by now and purchased the Epsom Perfection V300 Photo. The unit arrived and I set to work. My experience has almost all been with 35mm slides. This unit has exceeded my expectations at all levels! The transparency top and slide/negative holder works flawlessly. My slides are digitizes in a couple of minutes - four at a time. On thing I was worried about was the variation in different slides - would the Epson Perfection V300 be able to properly expose different slides correctly during a single pass?? You bet! It first does a quick scan to see what type of media it is dealing with and then it determines the orientation and exposure of the slide. I then does a slower, detailed scan resulting in a properly exposed scan. The unit has setting for fully automatic, home, office and professional settings. I use full auto most of the time but have used the other settings when the orientation has not been correct. These other modes offer increased detailed control over settings, size, resolution, orientation, exposure, dust cleaning, backlight compensation and color restoration. I have used these sparingly for problem photos.

I have had the unit for about 2 weeks and have digitized about 1500 slides thus far. It is going much faster than I had anticipated. I have hooked the unit up to an old Dell laptop and do this work while watching TV in the evening. I have also scanned a couple of envelopes of 35mm negatives. Again it has done a great job of automatically turning them to positives and correctly exposing each frame - magical!

One thing I have done is to get a film bulb blower and a micro cloth to clean the slides prior to scanning. The finished product benefits from having a clean slide to start with. I can also report that while cardboard slide holders work great I have some plastic film holders that always slip out of the scanner's slide transparency holder. By slide holder I'm talking about those little cardboard/plastic things that actually hold the 35mm film in place. Cardboard - good, plastic - bad.

I have been very excited to re-discover old photos I had forgotten about - photos of my - then girl friend - now wife and old college photos. Forgotten memories come to life!

I should mention that the unit comes with a CD loaded with the drivers for your computer and some software for film handling and a lightweight version of some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. I have Photoshop that I use to manipulate the photo further and have not yet tried the OCR software so I can't report on the effectiveness of that software. My impression of the Epson Perfection V300 Photo is overwhelmingly positive.

I would recommend this product to any who had a similar project in mind. Reasonable cost, quiet, quick and great scans.