Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner

I didn't expect very professional results with this scanner, all I wanted was a good enough scanner. The Epson Perfection V500 provided me more than adequate manual set-up, a whole range of monitoring capabilities and great speed for multiple project scans.
All these is enough to label this scanner as a professional model.

Don't hesitate to purchase this scanner. I hunted around & checked out reviews before purchasing this, and I truly could not be more impressed. I have had no problems with it in my first few months of steady, daily operation, the resultant photo file quality is superb. I suspected the Digital Ice example as above was probably photoshopped, but it is not...this feature is truly great with faded or discolored negatives, and it does wonders with dust/specks, etc. B&W tends to need a bit of adjusting of the saturation, but again, does a superb job, and saves so much time...Almost every scan of a properly saved negative needs no touch ups at all. Easy to use, top quality, and I can't imagine what more anyone could ask for. I had been taking my old negatives to the local camera shop that supposedly specialized in "digital" transfers & processing, but the Epson V500 surpassed what they had given me and I did these photos over again with much better results. To save a negative at 8x10 size, and at 300 .dpi takes approx. 3 to 4 minutes using the Digital Ice & Grain Reduction features, but it will save you much more time than fixing up the photo doing an untouched scan.

This might not come with the trays to do ALL types vintage negatives, but there is a way to do a raw scan and pick a region, so you can do virtually any negatives, even those nasty old tiny round projector photo discs. Can't say enough about this great product - it has become my new hobby.

I have cartons of albums and loose pictures dating from 1908. For our 50th anniversary party slide show, I thought it would be fun to show us, our kids, our families and friends during the years of our marriage. At the same time, I decided to scan ALL of the pictures I have so they would be (1)preserved digitally, (2) restored where possible, and (3) easy to find by category, names, events, trips, get-togethers, etc. I have an Epson 810 All-in-One which has a usable scanner although it can't scan a few of our largest pictures, and it is slow going. So I called Epson, and the suport person assured me this would be faster than using the printer. If it is, it is so by milliseconds. The scanning turned out to be a tedious, time consuming, aggravating experience.

First of all, you cannot do any editing of your pictures on the scanner, except for choosing "color restoration" which adds an often sickly blue tone. The only other option is to choose color, grayscale or b&w. Yet, you can't scan a picture in unless you first preview it. The only thing the preview does is allow you to rotate before you scan. Since Windows Picture Viewer allows you to rotate, this is redundant. The required Preview that has no useful function takes a minute or more, and then you have to choose Scan, which takes from 1-4 minutes. So, a picture can take as much as 4-6 minutes to scan, and this is usual. Even very small pictures take at least 3 minutes in all. When you are scanning in your entire photo library, thousands of pictures, this is a real pain.

Why can't you just put a picture on the flatbed and scan it directly with no preview? Either that or make it possible to crop, zoom, and do other simple editing during the preview. That would make sense. Oh, and did I mention that the scanner is very noisy, making sounds like something from out of space? I haven't yet tried to scan film or slides, so I can't comment on those functions. In sum, this is slow, lacks useful features, and is noisy. Other than that, it is easy to use and the scans come out fine. There's gotta be somethig better than this on the market.

I bought this scanner for my husband to scan some old slides we did over 50 years ago and it has worked great! We are enjoying sharing many of these pictures with friends and family.

The Epson V500 was easy to set up and to use. It was faster to copy the 100+ pictures I had to copy because I could do 4 at at time and they were separated for me by the scanner. The scanned quality was better than I expected especially with a few of the older pictures. I'd buy it again.