Epson Perfection® V700 PHOTO Flatbed Scanner

When I was ready to get something better than a $50 scanner, I went to an instructor at the local Community College. He teaches Photoshop, photography, and, by the way, is a successful commercial photographer. I asked him what to buy, and he said the V700 was the ONLY one in the running.

I ordered one from an online source for about $200 less than retail. It arrived in perfect new condition. I installed the software, and immediately my PaperPort recognized it as a new device. I did a few scans of receipts as I normally do, and it worked fine. I miss having the measuring scale on the physical platform and replicated on the scan preview. And the corner of the platform just seems to be a slight bit out of square, my originals never seem to 'seat' quite right.

But once I started scanning, I could see the difference between this and a $50 scanner. First, the choices of resolution and quality abound, up to 9600 dpi, which, by the way, makes a HUGE file. I also have a number of choices for the resulting file format, including a .pdf file, which is my favorite choice for archiving documents. I can single-step or batch scan a number of pages into a single PDF.

The REAL reason I bought this scanner was to do some slide digitizing. I've got a large (and OLD) collection of slides, and I've been aching to add those images to my growing digital collection. The Espon comes with a number of masks and frames that make the process simple. Once you learn how the slides should be oriented in the frame, you just fill it up and park it on the platform. You also have to remove the overhead pad so the scanner works on transparency instead of reflected light.

You do a preview, which shows you up to twelve slides. Here you can do orientation correction selectively, meaning the one that's upside-down, sideways, or inverted can be corrected with a mouse-click. You can also do some pretty sophisticated color correction, which nearly ALL my slides need, as they are decades old. The corrections are excellent, sidestepping time-consuming Photoshop steps. Now, the Preview screen shows the twelve slides, but they are not oriented the same way you put them in the frame, and that's a little confusing, but you get over it.

When you start the scan, the Epson software will build filenames in a consecutive naming structure, making it easy to do a slide tray batch without a lot of typing and tracking. It just does it.

I found that 35mm slides work best in a compromise of resolution and filesize. At 800 dpi, each image comes out to be around 4-5MB in size, and excellent quality. If you have a superb slide image, and are willing to wait for the results, you can choose up to 9600 dpi. I did that once, and the results were impressive, but the original slide must warrant that kind of time and resource. Mine did not.

All in all, the V700 (which is the stripped-down, non-batch, non-feeder version of the V750) is a great buy. Paper is fine, but film is just the best. 'Way outperforms my old HP color scanner with optional transparency lid, which cost me $1800 years ago. Those days are gone, and so is that old HP.

I highly recommend the Epson V700, and the software that comes with it. Even if you're a purist wanting nothing but the raw scan, it works GREAT. And if you want it all-in-one, the included software can turn out a great image in a single step.