Epson Perfection V500

I don't generally use sports metaphors in reviews, but sometimes there's no better way to put it. A case in point is the Epson Perfection V500 Photo ($249.99 direct). Epson has knocked one out of the park with this scanner. It offers high-quality scans for both prints and film and features an LED light source that eliminates warm-up time. Like almost any flatbed scanner, the V500 can handle all-purpose scanning, but it's focused on photos. This makes it most appropriate for anyone (short of a professional photographer) who needs to scan a backlog of prints and film (including slides) to digital format.

The scanner's long list of impressive features includes a 6,400-pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution, which is more than enough for scanning 35mm film; an LED light source that doesn't need time to warm up when the scanner's been sitting idle; and hardware-based Digital ICE for digitally removing dust and scratches from film. Even more important than the individual features is the way they work together, as a well-designed, fully integrated whole that makes it easy to take full advantage of each part.

Setting up the V500 is typical for a flatbed scanner. You install the software, plug in the scanner, connect a USB cable, and turn it on. In addition to the Epson Twain driver, which you can use directly or call up with almost any program that has a scan command, the bundled software includes two application programs. Photoshop Elements (my unit came with version 4.0, though Epson insists it ships with version 3) is a fairly sophisticated photo editor that's appropriate for the relatively serious amateur photographer the V500 is aimed at. ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint is a capable optical character recognition (OCR) program appropriate for basic OCR for personal use. It can save recognized text to a format suitable for editing and can save files in searchable PDF format for document management.

The V500's front panel includes one-touch scan buttons for scanning to a PDF-format image file, copying (sending a scan to your printer), e-mail (creating an e-mail message with the scan attached as a document), and calling up the Epson Twain driver to scan and save a file to disk.

The driver, complete with Epson's usual three modes, will be immediately familiar to anyone who's used other Epson scanners. The default mode is the scanner equivalent of a point-and-shoot mode on a camera, handling virtually all of the settings for you. Switch to Home mode and you can control a few settings, including adjusting brightness after a preview. Switch to Professional mode and you get much more control, with settings for color balance, saturation, and more.

All three modes include options for software-based dust removal and for restoring color to faded photographs—both of which worked reasonably well on my tests. Home and Professional modes include a backlight correction feature that automatically fixes photos with, for example, a dark face against a bright background. You simply click a check box, instead of having to adjust settings manually.

The two more advanced modes also include Digital ICE, a hardware-based dust-and-scratch-removal tool. It takes multiple scans and analyzes them to find and digitally remove dust and scratches. Digital ICE does a much better job than any software-based dust removal, but because of the multiple scans, it also takes longer. The V500 offers Digital ICE for film only. That's a common limitation for scanners with Digital ICE, since dust is a more critical issue for film than for prints.

The V500's scan quality for both prints and film is in the top tier for relatively inexpensive (sub-$500) flatbed scanners. All of the scans on my tests were easily good enough to print snapshots—and in most cases high-quality 8-by-10s, or even larger output, suitable for framing. Raw scan quality can certainly stand toe-to-toe with, for example, the Editors' Choice Canon Canoscan 8600F. In the real world, however, where slides often suffer from dust specks or scratches, Digital ICE gives the V500 an important quality boost.

Not so incidentally, although Digital ICE helps make the V500 a better choice than the 8600F for scanning film, the two share similar limits as to how many slides or frames they can scan at once. The V500 is limited to scanning four slides, two 6-frame strips of 35mm film, or one frame of medium-format film (6-by-12-centimeter, 2.25-inch, or 120/220) at a time. For my tastes that's too few for users who may want to scan a large number of slides or frames in one sitting. Still, it's much more convenient than using less expensive scanners—like the Epson Perfection V350 Photo—that scan only two slides at a time.

The V500's scan speed is well within the range of typical flatbeds for both prints and slides. More significant, the LED-based light eliminates warm-up time, which means the times are consistent from one scan to the next, whether the scanner's been sitting idle for hours or you've just finished another scan. Another benefit is that, unlike the cold cathode fluorescent lamps that most scanners use, LEDs don't contain mercury, which gives the V500 green credentials, too.

On my tests using fully automatic mode, the V500 took about 25 seconds overall to prescan (automatically adjusting settings) and then scan a 4-by-6 color photo at 300 ppi. Scanning slides in advanced mode at 2,400 ppi took 27 seconds for the prescan and 48 seconds for the scan. Using Digital ICE on the slides bumped the scan time up to 2 minutes 32 seconds.

The V500 suffers from some shortcomings as an all-purpose scanner, but that's inevitable for a scanner that focuses on photos. In particular, the choice to include a transparency adapter for film leaves no room for an automatic document feeder (ADF) to handle multipage documents. That, in turn, limits the V500's usefulness for office tasks like copying, faxing, and scanning documents for OCR. Even so, it's worth mention that the V500 scored reasonably well on accuracy for text recognition using FineReader Sprint. It read both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at font sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake.

For those who want to go beyond photos and use the V500 as a truly all-purpose scanner, Epson sells an ADF option ($199.99 direct) with a 30-page capacity. To use the ADF, however, you have to replace the scanner transparency adapter cover with the ADF cover. That's cumbersome enough that you probably won't want to switch between the two very often.

It's nice to know that you can use the V500 for office scanner tasks if you need to, but the real attraction of this scanner is for photos, particularly for film. The combination of raw scan quality, plus dust and scratch removal with Digital ICE, plus reasonable scan speed tied to never having to wait for the scanner to warm up, makes the V500 a winning package. It's also impressive enough to make it the new Editors' Choice for photocentric scanners in its price range.

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