Epson Perfection V600 Home Photo Scanner

This was bought as a replacement for an ancient Microtek which was never quite as focussed as it could have been. I was a little hesitant in case I was just expecting too much from a flatbed but really glad I went for it!The provided drivers CD installed easily on my old Win XP "scanning" netbook and also on my Win 10 laptop. I didn't install the full software because I use Vuescan but there were no complaints or warnings so I assume they'd also work.Once installed, it just worked.The attached coastal pics are a 3600DPI scan of a shot taken on Lomography 400asa 120 film with a Lubitel 2 TLR early on New Year morning and a 100% crop of the same to show the resolution achieved. Colour and contrast are "out of the box" using Vuescan's auto levels setting, with no post processing at all.On 35mm it's not quite as sharp as my dedicated Minolta Scan Dual but still gives perfectly acceptable and pleasing results, as shown by the macro of my old Contessa (Kodak Gold 200 in Zeiss Contaflex Super)Warm-up time is essentially zero. If you power it on at the same time as the host, it's ready by the time your OS is booted, and scanning is also surprisingly quick. A a 400DPI preview of 3x 120 negs appears within a minute and each frame takes just under 2 minutes to scan at 3600DPI, 48 bit colour. That may well be a little quicker if I wasn't using an old EEEPC to run it! In comparison, the Microtek used to take 2 minutes just to calibrate before each frame.Build quality feels good (as you'd expect from Epson) although the negative holders feel a little flexible. That's probably no bad thing as, being necessarily thin, if they were stiffer they'd be far more likely to get broken.On the downsides (because I have to find some):* The negative holders are VERY prone to static and attracting stray hairs. We have 2 cats and 2 dogs and the holders seemed to find every hair the hoover hadn't.* The transparency light isn't full width so it can only accept 2 strips of 35mm (12 frames total), 4 mounted 35mm slides, or a single strip of medium format (up to 220mm long) at a time.* Sheet film isn't supported (although could probably be scanned in parts and stitched)But those are really pretty minor points given the overall excellent experience and results, and the fact that it's obviously not intended for a production environment.Thoroughly recommended for negative scanning at an excellent quality / cost point, particularly with medium format.

I found this machine quite easy to use even though I'm not that tech savvy. I would advise going through youtube for tutorials beforehand, they're very helpful. Once you check these out, saving your photos, negs and slides to digital is a doddle.Bear in mind if you want uncompressed images, they will be a lot bigger in file size, depends how much space you are happy to take up on your computer memory. Accurate colours and clarity, colour restoration is good. The ICE option does clean up scratches and dust but I found does render certain images softer, edges aren't as sharp, depends on your choice. Images are as they were taken originally, don't expect magical improvement. It does what is says on the tin. Delivery was very good, all the various accessories were present, set up took a couple of minutes, startup in seconds.Documents to pdf was also very good, naturally faster than images, equally as accurate and clear. Each page is 1 pdf file, you can get a free program for joining files together, quite easy. All in all, a very good machine that does everything you need, just do your research first on how to use your settings and all your old memories will preserved forever.Highly recommended.

This is an excellent quality scanner if you want one that can double as a standard flatbed scanner and a negative/slide scanner. It comes with all the necessary accessories to scan strips of 35mm negatives (you can scan up to 10 at once if you are lucky enough to have them cut into strips of 5; 4 is more common so you will usually be scanning 8 at a time); 35mm slides in their frames; and medium format negatives.So far I have used it to scan slides, 35mm negatives and prints. I've never owned a medium format camera so can't make specific comment but I doubt there's much difference from its behaviour with 35mm negatives. When you do a preview scan of negatives or slides, the software recognises each frame as a separate item and will scan it as a separate file. This is incredibly useful, especially as you can un-check any that you don't want to scan. You can also rotate each frame in Preview if it is upside down or in portrait format, and flip the image to give a mirror image if you've put the negative strip in the holder the wrong way up - although I do recommend getting them the right way up (showing as a mirror image from above) as the scan quality seems to be sharper. Using it as a flatbed scanner, it seemingly can't recognise two prints as separate items (though of course you could still separate them subsequently) but if you only scan one, it will automatically restrict the scan to the area of the print or whatever else you may be scanning, as long as it is rectangular and aligned with the sides of the platen.It's important to understand the resolution settings. For most purposes, you will want to set the Mode to Home Mode and the Destination to Other - this enables higher resolution scanning at a range of resolutions. It is crucial to realise - especially with small items such as negatives - that the resolution (in dpi) refers to dots per inch in the OUTPUT file (which depends on the target size) not in the INPUT from the negative. In other words, if you use a larger target size from the drop down list (set per individual frame after the Preview scan) you will get higher resolution for the same dpi. I have been using the US B (11x17 in.) setting because it most closely resembles the aspect ratio of a 35 mm negative (4x6 crops more off the ends); it also happens to be the largest preset target size - on this setting, a modest sounding 400dpi produces a 92MB TIFF file with, obviously, very high resolution. This is because the file is 4400 x 6800 pixels; you may well be happy with a lower resolution and certainly I can see no obvious loss of resolution from the 600dpi that I tried initially, nor when I process the TIFF files and save them as much smaller JPEGs with a length of 4000 pixels. On the other hand, if you were using a smaller target size (e.g. 4 x 6) you would need to use a higher dpi setting to get the same resolution. Smaller is of course faster but scanning negatives at a decent resolution is not a quick business and scanning them at any resolution is not that fast due to the fiddly process of loading them correctly without getting fingerprints on them or the scanner glass. Loading slides (up to four at a time) is much easier because they just sit in slots in the holder. I've not used the various automatic processing options that come with the software apart from the "DIGITAL ICE Technology", which is meant to remove scratches and dust from the image. It does this pretty effectively, greatly reducing the amount of time and effort you're likely to have to put into cleaning up the files, but at the cost of roughly doubling the amount of time it takes to scan at any given resolution.I've been impressed by the results from slides, negatives and prints, however the software from the supplied disc that controls the scanner is out of date and has a tendency to crash at the drop of a hat if your PC is using Windows 10, and especially if you are using other applications at the same time - you will see the blue circle of death and, if you try to do anything with it, you will be told that it is "not responding". In these circumstances, you have to close the software and turn off the scanner. Then turn the scanner back on and restart the software when it is ready. This is annoying and (moderately) time consuming but most crucially you can't work on the previous batch in Photoshop or whatever while you're scanning. Almost any program seems to potentially cause crashes. Even basic office software can spook it and you will have to turn everything else off, set up a batch and go off and do something else while it scans. I should add that I'm using a standard 64-bit version of Windows 10 with all the up-to-date patches, just as most other PC users will be, and a perfectly adequate 8GB of RAM. I wonder if the software on the disc supplied with the scanner has been updated since it was first released in 2009.But don't let this put you off because the good news is that if you search online for "Epson Perfection V600 Photo Windows 10 Driver", as I did after a few days of frustration, you will get a link to Epson's website where you can download an up-to-date (20 March 2019) version of the software. I can't speak for whether they have similarly updated it for current Mac OS (other reviewers have said it doesn't work at all with the latest version and they had to buy 3rd party software to be able to use it) but so far the Windows 10 64 bit version is definitely more stable than the version supplied on the disc. I don't know whether you can simply download the new version and bypass installing the one on the disc but if you do install the old version, installing the new version is very simple and seems to overwrite it so there shouldn't be any issues - I would do this straight away instead of faffing around for days walking on digital eggshells to avoid upsetting it. Having said which, while it is definitely more stable with the updated driver it still has a tendency to crash if you do other stuff on the PC while scanning. You can get away with surfing the net, however. If you want to make notes or process the files between batches I recommend closing the software until you're ready to scan the next batch.You have to be really careful with 35mm negatives to load them properly in the holder. I've had a few instances of iridescent "haloes" across a frame - often just one or two in a batch of eight. I suspect this means part of the negative (they're always a bit curled lengthways) may have been in contact with the glass, which may have been caused by failing to snap shut every single catch on the cover that holds in the negatives, or perhaps one or more had popped open as I was manoeuvring it into position in the scanner. Or the strips may just not have been quite correctly aligned; it's hard to tell so you may just have to re-scan them in these circumstances - try to ensure that the sprocket holes are completely concealed by the cover. The holder and especially the cover seem quite flimsy, so treat them gently - they could probably break quite quite easily, as could the catches. Another issue with 35mm negatives is getting the files output from the scanner in the correct order. To do this, assuming you're scanning two strips at once, the strip with the earlier shots should be in the righthand slot in the adapter (furthest away from the slide slots); the negatives should be face down so that they are scanned the right way round; and the lowest numbers on the negatives should be at the end of the adapter that goes nearest to the hinge of the lid. If you do this, they will always be output in the correct order.Success with this unit is time-consuming and requires care, even after you've installed the up-to-date software, however the results speak for themselves and I would expect to get professional-looking results from professional-looking negatives - in quality terms it's a serious piece of kit. But if you've got thousands of old negatives to scan, I'd prioritise the best ones or you'll be at it for years, literally! As for prints, the scan quality is again excellent but unless you don't have the negatives or there was something special about the printing process and/or the paper, I wouldn't bother - the difference in detail and often colour balance between scans of prints and of negatives when they were processed by a consumer-standard lab (Boots etc.) can be considerable. All that said, in flatbed mode it will scan almost anything to a high quality and can be lifted at the hinge to allow something up to about an inch thick (e.g. a book) to be scanned without the lid being at an angle.