I am a color and black and white photographer and do-it-yourself developer. I recently purchased this scanner as my old CanoScan could not handle my film and has limited software.
Pros:
- Probably as much DPI as you would need: 4800 dpi hardware, 12000+ with interpolation (3200 dpi on 35mm produces ~4000X3000 pixel images, around 12 megapixels, with medium format you can get the same with lower dpi)
- Digital ICE, which can help eliminate dust, but not water spots (makes scanning take 5-6 times as long though)
- Good image quality
- Very inexpensive
- 12 35mm frames per scan
- Decent software compared to other scanners, auto separates photos, auto normalizes, etc
- 16-bits per channel option, can save as .tif
Cons:
- It came with one tiny speck of dust underneath scanner glass. This same shape of dust shows up over and over again on negative images as bright white, but it can be clone brushed out - this is the biggest issue I've had with this scanner, they should be more careful at the factory, but it is a small speck so nothing major
- Scanning is a bit slow (1 minute per 35mm frame at 3200 dpi, 5 or 6 minutes per same frame if ICE is on)
- If the film has a bend to it and touches scanner glass, you have to turn it over or it will get aberrations called Newton's rings - they recommend scanning with emulsion side up but this is not always possible due to this
- Can only scan 2 medium format images per scan, and the software sometimes messes up the thumbnailing of these which requires turning thumbnailing off and manually making cropping rectangles - not a huge deal but could be improved
- Software auto-checkmarks unsharp mask when you scan things, you're required to un-check it each time if you want unaltered images, but this is easy
- Software doesn't have an option to save as .png
I would recommend this scanner.
The Epson Perfection 4490 Photo offers fully automatic scanning for increased productivity, plus two advanced scanning modes for greater control. Convenient film holders accommodate multiple 35mm slides and negatives, plus medium format film. And, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 ensures fast data transfer. There's even a fully featured software package that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements, ABBYY FineReader Sprint, and more.
Compatible with both Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems, this scanner provides an unbeatable solution for any task or project. Rich in quality and versatility, the Epson Perfection 4490 Photo will highlight and optimize every detail. When partnered with an Epson Stylus ink jet printer, it's a perfect choice for creating brilliant images made to last.
Features include:
I have owned numerous hand held, flatbed, and multifunction scanners over the last 20+ years and the S1300 is the best one yet. In the two weeks I have owned it I have scanned in a stack of paperwork and documents 28" high and a 4" stack of business cards. Of those thousands of pages I've experienced about 10 paper jams and 2 double-feeds. All of them were because of the documents and not the scanner. Clearing jams and double-feeds is easy and the scanner automatically rejects the scan so you can feed the docs right back in. The specifications indicate the sheet feeder holds 10 pages, but 12 pages of normal weights will feed through easily. The sheet feeder doesn't wrap or bend the documents like most sheet-fed scanners so cardboard stock and business cards pass through easily and aren't bent in any way.
The bundled software is what really makes the scanner shine. ScanSnap Organizer and ScanSnap Viewer make it extremely easy to edit the PDF documents and convert them to email or Word, Excel or PowerPoint. The Viewer allows you to rotate individual pages, change the page order, delete pages, and even crop out anything on a page you don't want. When scanning in duplex mode the software does a great job of detecting and discarding blank pages.
The only negatives I can think of are the included documentation is very sparse, even the documentation on the CD. The software is so easy to use there's really no need for extensive documentation though. The business card software is not quite as good as the ScanSnap software, but does a fair job of OCR and picking out name and address information. I found about 40% of scanned cards need to be manually edited. The only complaint with the hardware is visible white streaks when scanning images at the higher resolution settings to .JPG format. Cleaning the scan heads helps but it appears the streaks are caused by the sheet feeder leaving slight impressions which are picked up by the sensitive scan heads.
For Linux users out there looking for a compatible scanner, this one works perfectly in Ubuntu 9.10 with XSane.
I give high ratings to this scanner.
The office scanner does come with the transparency materials that the Photo version offers and it comes with the automatic feeder. Previously I had a seven year old Epson 1640 Office.
I use the scanner for two different purposes:
Office: Where I use Paperport and Omnipage (OCR).
Art: Where I use Photoshop and In Design to scan in photos and illustrations, but black and white and color, sometimes from older, yellowed material.
This worked so well and so much better than the previous Epson I was surprised. After I played with the setting for 30 minutes I was able to scan in pictures and illustrations that were just great. The settings often eliminated the yellow backgrounds of old paper and made the flesh colors far more realistic. What took a bit of time in Photoshop now took no time at all. The colors we accurate.
It worked very quickly and well for my office use in Paperport and Omnipage. The feeder worked well and fast when scanning in black and documents at 150-200 dpi.
Unlike the old scanner, this scanner puts setting into three modes. Home, Office and Professional, but believe it or not, I just use the home mode for most of what I do. Each mode gives you several options and that is what I played with for 30 minutes. In the preview mode, you can "play" with the various settings and adjust the picture to your preference, before you do the actual scan. After a few time, I learned what settings for what kind of picture and so it does not take long. The picture quality is far superior than the Epson 1640. I was really surprised.
Epson software also comes with a "Scan Direct" button, where you can scan directly into any program or your printer.
Legal size documents do have to use the Automatic Document Feeder. The flatbed scanning area is about 12 inches so most of my Legal documents would still fit there, but an extra inch would have been nice. It is a bit louder than I would like and scanner is never instant, especially when you are scanning in at high dpi, but those would not be serious considerations for me in buying the unit.
My only serious disappointment is that NO instruction manual is included, nor is a PDF one put on the disc. Instead, you most have internet access to web style pages, that you cannot even print out as a book. I think I was at an advantage having the similar previous one, but this was a disappointment.
Main Features
The Fujitsu fi-4860C2 production color scanner doesn"t force you to choose between color, quality and performance. With hardware-assisted VRS your overall scanning productivity is greatly enhanced by reducing the amount of effort needed in the document preparation process.
After being quite content with my now-outdated Microtek E3 SCSI scanner, I decided to go Microtek again with the new slimscan USB. Although I would say that scans are slower than the older SCSI model, the overall quality is much better, and the interface is improved. As mentioned in other reviews, the OCR provided with the package is somewhat weak, but functional. I would recommend purchasing OmniPage Pro by Caere for higher-quality OCR recognition, although this may run you around a hundred dollars, last time I checked. The model is quite thin, although I too have had troubles making the button in the front, which is supposed to launch applications in Windows, functional. All in all a solid purchase at a solid value.
-Pete
Setting up the actual scanner was remarkably easy; figuring out how to use all the included software was a bit more difficult. The Microtek SlimScan C6 comes with a handy quick-start guide, but detailed documentation is only available in electronic form.
The Microtek SlimScan C6 comes with a great software installer that lets you load all the different software packages one after another. Once we had installed the software, photo scanning was simple--we pushed the single button on the scanner, and our computer automatically launched the scan program. Scanning and recognizing text was also easy; the optical character recognition (OCR) software was completely accurate for most documents we tried.
The Microtek SlimScan C6 also comes with a variety of image-editing and document-management software. Microtek's ScanWizard was particularly useful, since it let us enhance and edit images before we scanned them. It also has a great descreening feature that makes it possible to scan previously printed material without distorted Moire dot patterns.
In addition to performing well as a simple scanner--giving us relatively good picture quality and medium-to-high resolution (600 x 1200 dpi)--the Microtek SlimScan C6 also functions as a fax machine and can convert a color printer into a color copier. Its incredibly thin form makes it a good choice for those with limited desk space, although at 7.7 pounds it's still not quite a portable scanner.
Pros:
Cons:
I just wanted to report that contrary to what others are saying, this scanner works fine for me in XP SP2. It took me all of three minutes to get it working.
I downloaded the latest driver (an ancient one dated 7-30-03) and the driver said it couldn't connect to the scanner. Then I went to the Device Manager (it was listed as a non-working scanner under "Other devices") and said "reinstall driver" and it now works perfectly.
I doubt there is a problem with the driver itself, only with the driver being properly installed under SP2. If you install the driver normally then reinstall it under device manager, it works fine.
There's really nothing wrong with the scanner.
I have many photos and would like to scan them, but do not want to do one at a time on a flatbed scanner. So a while ago, I learned about (and purchased) the HP 5500c Scanjet Scanner. HP's product was junk, the "auto crop" feature was more like auto slop. The resulting image that HP produced included an area around the photo including a bunch of the scanner's mechanisms visible along with the desired image. totally useless. Reading the amazon customre reviews for the HP 5500c Scanjet Scanner product, I learned that others found the Epson product to be the real deal. I found a seller, purchased the item and it arrived this week. I tried it out and had no trouble. Thank you Epson. Shame on you, HP, for aparently not even trying to get your product right before you push it out the door -- and for not doing anything once the problem was reported again and again by your customers. The epson product is the right choice.
Note - scanning does take some time, maybe 30-45 seconds per photo. So no matter what you do, if you've got 1000's of photos to scan, it is going to require some effort. Once I start on my collection, I will most likely hit the project 24 photos at a time, as time allows, rather than try to bang out hundreds at a time.
Epson, you rock.
Overall, the scanner works exactly as documented and is a good value. I've identified only a few problems so far, and one is mostly a minor issue of needing to do a little extra work. I bought it to convert my mother in laws enormous (70K+) slide collection to digital form before the media failed completely.
On the positive side, there's not a lot that can go wrong with this device. It's a straightforward digital camera/projector device, and most modern operating systems recognize it immediately as a digital camera and let you use it with zero software installation. I plugged it into my Macbook and it immediately "just worked". Images are reasonably sized and quite sharp (assuming the original slide is in moderately good shape). The ability to put an SD card in and just scan until it's full is very nice (although supporting a SD card larger than 2G would be nice -- the 2G ones are getting hard to find). If you're doing a lot of slides, I'd suggest having a friend help -- with two people (one loading the trays and one scanning), you can do about 2 slides per minute.
The problems I mentioned above are: 1) if you have the older thicker plastic slide carriers (a hard plastic frame around the slide film), it's difficult to fit them into the trays, and then to push the trays through the scanner. The cardboard slide carriers work fine. Second, 2) the slide tray design forces the slides to be inserted with the long axis of the slide going from left to right. This means that if you have a lot of images that are taller (vertically oriented), you'll have to do a fair amount of rotating images in iPhoto or similar programs to get everything right side up. 3) it's hard to get the slides positioned correctly so that the top or bottom of the image isn't cut off. There are registration notches on the slide trays, but they don't seem to be really calibrated to the position of the lens. You eventually get the hang of it as you work with it, but it would be really nice if the notches matched the image field correctly.
I'm about 35K slides into the project, and so far it's held up pretty well. I'd say it's a keeper.
I do not really understand the missing or scarcely obtainable driver for XP matter. I have just bought an old instance of this scanner, and XP supports it natively, there is no need the UMAX driver at all. I checked the properties of the native driver, it belongs to Microsoft and its creation date is on 2001. There is (Sane) support in Linux too. So far I'm content with the device, at least it was worth of buying for .
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Easy-to-Use Software
BulletScan Manager Software makes it easy for you to control your scanning processes, file formats, and scan-to destinations. The BulletScan S400 includes nine scan-to destinations with one-click configuration for scan-to-email, scan-to-print, scan-to-PDF, searchable PDF, and others.
Additionally, BulletScan Manager offers both easy and advanced scan mode settings. In easy mode, default features include auto straighten, auto crop, auto rotate, and edge cleanup. Advanced mode allows for fine tuning of all settings.
Optimum Accuracy with Auto-Language Detection
The BulletScan S400 is powered by ABBYY FineReader Technology, the same technology used for ABBYY FineReader Desktop OCR, a PC Magazine four-star product. With high optical character recognition accuracy, the BulletScan is able to reduce the size of PDF files without any loss of visual quality. Additionally, the smart software retains text-under-image, text-over-image, text-and-picture, or image-only PDFs.
The FineReader technology has automatic language detection, so you get no-hassle scanning, OCR, and conversion. It automatically detects documents in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
System Requirements
The BulletScan S400 requires a computer with a Pentium 4 or equivalent processor, Windows 7/XP (SP 2)/Vista operating system, 512 MB of RAM (1 GB for Vista), 350 MB of available hard drive space, a CD/DVD-ROM drive, and a USB port.
The BulletScan S400 is rated for a daily duty cycle of 3,000 pages and is backed by a two-year warranty.
What's in the Box
Scanner, USB cable, power supply, quick-install guide, and installation CD.
