Best Flatbed Scanners
— The Epson Perfection V600 Photo delivers outstanding quality scans from photos, film, slides and everyday documents. Featuring DIGITAL ICE for both film and prints, one-touch color restoration and. Arcsoft Photostudio. , this scanner provides a complete photo restoration solution. 6400 x 9600 dpi for film Enlargements up to 17” x 22” Built-in Transparency Unit (TPU) For slides, negatives and medium-format film. up to 6 x 22 cm Scan everything you need Film, photos, documents, invoices, receipts, books, magazines and 3D objects Complete photo restoration solution. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. DIGITAL ICE for Prints Remove the appearance of tears. and creases from damaged photos DIGITAL ICE for Film Remove the appearance of dust and. scratches from film Easy Photo Fix For one-touch color restoration Increased productivity. ReadyScan LED technology Fast scanning and no warm-up time Optical Character Recognition (OCR) For converting scanned documents into editable text Four customizable buttons Instantly copy, scan-to-email and create PDF’s Features/Benefits Create extraordinary enlargements from film — 6400 x 9600 dpi for enlargements up to 17" x 22" Scan slides, negatives and medium–format panoramic film — built-in Transparency Unit Remove the appearance of tears and creases from damaged photos — DIGITAL ICE for Prints Remove the appearance of dust and scratches from film — DIGITAL ICE for Film Restore faded color photos with one touch — Epson Easy Photo Fix included Achieve greater productivity — convert scanned documents into editable text with ABBYY FineReader Sprint Plus OCR Quickly complete any task — instantly scan, copy, scan-to-email and create PDFs with four customizable buttons Energy-efficient LED for fast scans — exclusive ReadyScan LED light source means no warmup time, faster scans and lower power consumption Take your photos further — Arcsoft Photostudio included, to help edit and enhance your digital images Weight and Dimensions (W x D x H) — Weight: 9.0 lb, Dimensions: 11" x 19" x 4.6". What's in the Box Perfection V600 Photo color scanner Transparency unit (built into lid) Film holders for: 35mm film and mounted slides & 6 x 22 cm medium-format film Scanner software CD-Rom Arcsoft Photostudio DVD Start Here poster Hi-Speed USB 2.0 cable AC adapter and power cable. Remove the appearance of dust and scratches from film — DIGITAL ICE for Film.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"11th Day Update: all 5400 slide transparencies (35mm mounted slides) have been scanned (at 2400dpi) and burned to DVDs. That was with only selective use of Color Restoration, which doesn't add anytime to the scan. We would look at each set of 4 preview images and click and highlight the ones we wanted to color restore (click on the slide, do NOT click on the checkbox...leave the checkbox on each preview CHECKED ON...that's what lets the scanner know you want to scan all 4 slides that you just previewed). Background: BFA in Art with concentration in Darkroom Photography; Own my own darkroom for 25 years; Decade as an Imaging Specialist/Scanner Operator (you can skip the next few paragraphs and get to the settings which worked well for us while scanning a bunch of old slides). Every day for a decade, 8 hours a day I used PhotoShop 3.0+, flatbed scanners, image setters and even a Nikon Coolscan slide scanner with an automatic slide-feeder. As I recall the slide feeder could hold about 40 mounted slides and took about 8 minutes per slide to scan. I wanted to set up a new, easy scan station for my father to scan his old slides: 54 slide projector carousels (round thingies) filled with a maximum 100 slides each. SETTINGS FOR SLIDE SCANNING. I installed the CD software, then plugged in the machine, and finally I turned it on with the ON/OFF button HIDDEN on the right side of the machine. So, for decent slide scans here is a nice setting list: Mode = Professional. Document type = Positive film. Image Type = 48-bit. Resolution = 2400 dpi. CHECK the unsharp mask box to turn it on, set level to LOW. CHECK the Color Restoration box to turn it on. Click preview, select and flip any upside-down slides with the options. Click Scan and sit back and wait while all 4 slides are scanned (a little under 4 minutes to scan and auto-name and auto-save). ACTUAL PROJECT: Each slide takes 1 minute to scan, auto-name and auto-save. 54 boxes of slides x 100 slides each = 5400 slides. Yes, at about 1 minute per slide it's a little slower (at 2400dpi) but you can save a little time and scan at 1200dpi, or even go down to 100dpi, lol. A minute per slide is a lot slower than 1 second per slide. I'd rather spend two weeks getting 5,400 great scans then spend 5 hours getting crappy scans that look terrible and I'll end up deleting. WHAT DIDN'T WORK WELL (FOR US) AND WHAT DID. First off, use the professional mode for slides. The automatic easy mode has drawbacks: it only allows 1200dpi scans at the highest setting; even though it's only 1200dpi it seems to take longer than the professional mode at 2400dpi; even though in the manual it says you can skip the preview...it actually does one preview at a time and shows that to you while it scans, which means the preview portion takes FOUR times as long. Also, when you select the color restoration option: the little preview is color restored, but the scan isn't! So: it takes 2x-4x as long and doesn't actually apply color restoration to the scan that is autosaved to your computer. Thus: if you want to scan, color restore and sharpen you have to use the professional mode (and re-check the color restoration box after selection "all" 4 previews with the blue frame highlighting them AFTER EVERY PREVIEW!!!!). I fiddled a little with the grain removal setting, but it just kind of blurred my test slides. There are other settings were you want to: UNcheck the write over files with the same name (why would you want to overwrite your previous scans? TIFFs are still a tad bigger, but if you're scanning once and then throwing away your slides then scan huge and save as TIFF for that once in a lifetime chance of archiving. Somewhere in the advanced settings option when you first open Epson Scan you can also uncheck the "include color profiles" box. Unless you're sending your files to a professional printing press that needs specific color profiles THIS JUST BLOATS THE SIZE OF EACH OF YOUR SCANS! I don't care about LAB COLOR vs CMYK vs Srgb ICC profiles and when I was a professional our printers (and by printers I mean the humans who ran huge color printing presses that are about 40' long) would set their prepress to strip out/ignore any color profiles accidentally left attached to image files we sent them...because THEY wanted to control the color, not some random file that nobody on our end looked at or modified or fixed or cared about. UNLESS YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER SENDING SCANS TO A COLOR PRINT PUBLICATION THAT REQUIRES YOU TO SEND ALONG COLOR PROFILES uncheck the box and save space on your computer. Click on Epson Scan. Select "Professional" and "Current Settings". 2400dpi. Check color restoration box on. Check unsharp max on / Medium. Dust spray and put in 4 slides. ****VERY IMPORTANT STEP RIGHT HERE: Click the "ALL" button the highlight all four previews with blue frames and then click "RESTORE COLOR CHECKBOX TO ON"/ (The color restoration feature shuts itself off after every preview, and if you turn it back on it only applies to the previews with blue frames around them!). This is for "pros" who only color restore 1 out of every 4 slides or whatever. Computer (we have a 2/3 year old Dell with i5 core processor and Windows 10, regular non-solid state hard drive). This Scanner. Dust-off Sprayer. USB Thumbdrive (archive 1). Blank DVDs (archive 2 or more if you burn multiple copies to send to various relatives). External HD (archive 3). Time: 1 minute per slide. This thing is heavier than my 25 year old Umax PowerLook III scanner which was used in by my at my job in a multi-million dollar publishing empire. I don't know who got to take home the Nikon CoolScan slide scanner (w/auto-feeder), LOL! Do you have only a month to scan 50,000 slides? Well, then contract a vendor to do them for 60 cents per slide and then sell you an external hard drive with your scans on it...plus shipping...plus expedited service...plus insurance which will give you a few dollars if the shipper looses all your slides so instead of your photos you'll have like $300 and the horror of loosing priceless, irreplaceable pictures. By the way: for my 5,400 slides it would cost at least $3,240 to have them scanned (plus shipping, plus hard drive they return the scans on, etc.). If anything I gave you: a template to plan your project/setup/costs & some easy start-up settings to get great slide scans. UPDATE: It's the second day of ownership, and even with our time spent testing settings, setting up a light box, unpacking and dusting off 54 boxes of 100-slide carousel wheels we managed to scan 2 entire boxes out of the 54! The ONLY THING THAT SUCKS ABOUT IT IS: after every 4 slide batch is previewed the "Color Restoration" box UNchecks itself. So you have to select all four previews and ONLY THEN click to check the color restoration box, and then scan. I can spend 5-15 minutes trying to color correct an RGB color image, and even longer for a CMYK image for print (textbook, magazine, book cover, etc.). After you do a few dozen you won't even have to think: your hand will just click ALL and Color Correct and SCAN. Good luck, have fun, spend a day or two scanning and rescanning a few documents to get the perfect settings and physical workflow that works for you!"
"While that sounds like an over whelming task, it has changed my approach to working with my family archives. Rather than simply copy them forward to digital in their original condition, I am being handed an opportunity to improve them. But, with the right mindset you can enjoy the experience of enhancing those photographic captures that you have kept and treasured, but seldom viewed. While in LR, as the last enhancement, edit the photo in a separate software, Noiseless CK. While the process takes time, it is enjoyable and rewarding to see the old memories once again before you in Kodak Carousel brightness and color -- and better. I doubt this machine is up to professional application either in terms of endurance or image quality."
"The second picture was scanned with Digital ICE and you can see how it removed all the dust and imperfections that were left on the slide even though I cleaned it using canned air."
"I got rid of all my darkroom equipment years ago along with all my film cameras, but still had a lot of 6x6 and 35mm negatives and Kodachrome slides. Also, when working with negatives and slides, just like you were working in darkroom, dust is a real PITA at these levels of enlargement."
With the FF-640, you can scan thousands of photos — as fast as 1 photo per second (2). Ideal for life's special events - easily create slideshows, displays and more for anniversaries, weddings and family reunions.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I can't blame the unit for poorly stored photos that aren't totally flat, nor can I definitively say this is the problem. I have cleaned the daylights out of it so that is not the problem. A very fast, clever, unit with mostly good UI software that also does a good job of enhancing photos with the exception of red eye which is pretty bad. I would really like to hear more from Epson about the blob problem and perhaps see more scan pressure on the paper, or maybe an accessory to help flatten photos if that is indeed the problem."
"Then it auto adjusts the photos (white balance and color) which saves me hours of Photoshopping to do the same. I can't say enough positive things about this smart gadget, and how many years it is probably going to save me."
"In the past I have used a flatbed scanner for scanning photos, but it is just too slow and cumbersome to scan a large number of photos in a timely fashion. I own a Fujitsu ix500 ScanSnap scanner that quickly scans both photos and documents that I use mainly for document scanning, so I was quite interested to see how the Epson FastFoto FF-640 scanner would compare. Oddly, unlike any other scanner I have owned, no installation disc is included, and you are directed to Epson’s web site to download the necessary scanning software to use the scanner. Once you have installed the basic software and connected the scanner you can download additional software to add OCR functionality and features for greater scanning configuration. This is an extremely fast scanner and scans photos significantly faster than my Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 scanner. The only real time consuming aspect of scanning with this Epson scanner is making the configuration settings prior to scanning. Overall, the Epson Fast Foto FF-640 scanner is a lightning fast scanner that does a very nice job of scanning photos and documents, including business cards and credit cards. It is significantly faster than the Fujitsu ix500 ScanSnap scanner, which is also a very fast scanner, but the Epson scanner also costs a great deal more. For scanning primarily photos, though, the Epson FastFoto scanner would be a better choice if you have lots of photos to scan and want automatic image enhancement as the Epson FastFoto does this very easily and with lightning speed. The Fujitsu scanner is better suited for document scanning, and while it can scan photos it lacks the scanning resolution and image enhancement features that Epson offers with its scanner. For primarily document scanning, though, I think the Fujitsu ix500 scanner is simpler to use and does a better job of helping to organize scanned documents at a much lower cost."
The color scanner for precise film and photo reproductions. Operating Systems: Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Mac OS X 10.6.x, 10.7.x, 10.8.x, 10.10.x.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"UPDATE: a year and 10 months, 3000 + slides and photos into the project. Still liking this scanner. one small thing to note...on the slide holder there are 4 little height adjustments in the corners. First I got the Canon 9000 but returned it when I noticed a red fuzzy line that went through all the photos that were scanned on the left side of the scanner bed. NO problems yet.....basically zero warm up time, lots of options for cleaning up the photos as it scans them if you want. Time-wise....It's about a minute per slide (at 4800 dpi no "ICE" or clean up) And roughly the same for photos at 1200 dpi (no ICE etc). For slides, you put 12 in the holder and it does a quick preview scan, shows them all in a column and then lets you go through each one to flip or rotate or apply any one of a number of processes on each one individually. From there I had to put a different "prefix" on the names so that it would save the file in the same folder as all the other ones without writing over something."
"However, with the SilverFast software I'm able to load 3 strips of negatives, prescan, and start a batch scan in a couple of minutes."
"My old Canon was perfect for this, but it died, and today's scanners accommodate only film strips. Scanning is fast, because I don't use SilverFast or Digital Ice (I prefer Photoshop); a 4x5 negative, 48-bit, 1200 dpi scanned in under a minute. A film strip scanned at 2400 dpi took a minute, but the Preview was awful; I could barely see the image."
"I even tried a 3200 dpi scan with the Epson that didn't match the quality of the Canon scan. But I now know that if I come upon another significant scanning project (through inheritance or whatever), I will have to upgrade the quality of my flatbed to a scanner that costs a third or less of the Epson V800 to get really good quality scans."
"Excellent scanner and comes with very good software that works on Windows or MAC OS."
Best Document Scanners
Intelligent scan correction performs a quick quality check on your scans - features include auto color detection, auto rotation for upside down documents, and blank page removal.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It didn't eat any pages (of really soft paper, not regular paper), it didn't skip any pages, and the auto-detect for black-and-white versus color and blank-pages is ridiculously helpful. It even had no problem sucking in very hard paper (like a cover) and then right back to soft paper of a different size! It needs another flip-up lip to catch the paper as it comes out, otherwise it starts to pop off and dump on the desk."
"They cut down on paper considerably, as we scan documents brought in by clients and hand them back to the clients. These scanners save on filing time, which saves money and tedium for my employees, and they save money on file cabinets and floor space. The documents scan to pdf and are then easily stored in electronic files (backed up in a dual core hard drive onsite and in cloud storage offsite)."
"When you scan as much as we do, little annoyances become a big deal. I like how the one-touch scan button understands when I want to begin a scan and resume a scan. The eject button and fold out top is designed well enough that it's easy to gently blow out particles and carefully clean the top and bottom scan heads. Scanning to searchable PDF works incredibly well. The OCR module does a pretty admirable job of scanning text and making it searchable in a PDF. Pro tip: if you're on Windows and you want to use Windows Search to look for text in PDF you need to go download Adobe's PDF iFilter app and install it on every computer that needs to search the PDFs, not just the server or workstation where the PDFs reside. Software installation is clumsy and requires a bunch of updates. The ONE THING this scanner needs to do right is to scan to searchable PDF. In order to do this, I had to turn off all the "quick button" features and change the app to scan to application: save to a folder. I demo'd it before some scanning/archiving company tried to bid us $10,000 to do our scanning work for us and their demo system did far worse than this little scanner."
"I have used at least 5 different scanners trying to find one that would handle years of old paperwork. I have thousands of tiny fuel receipts on crumpled carbon paper that no scanner would scan without jamming."
"It's super fast and it's made my life easier by improving my productivity both at our office and at home."
Best Business Card Scanners
The Xerox DocuMate 3125 color desktop scanner quickly converts your documents, plastic cards and forms into digital files, then securely saves them on your computer or in the cloud ready to be accessed another day when needed. Create searchable PDF files to make it easy to find scanned documents.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I own 2 and use it on a local network."
"Takes up little space and trays can be closed easily when not in use - this takes up even less space and helps to keep clean."
"Best desktop scanner I have ever had."
"Good to use in a small business."
"This is our third scanner."
"Worked OK for a while."
Best Slide & Negative Scanners
Video Out for TV Connection (Cable Included); Mac & PC Compatible.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Having read a bunch of online resourced about various film scanning solutions I knew I had a few options. Dedicated film scanners would be great, but expensive for a good one, and still very tedious. So I looked around at some cheap consumer film scanners and decided to give this one a shot. I had the rolls developed and scanned on Noritsu scanners by a professional lab. I included a photoshop aligned image showing just how much cropping is going on. - Screen is total crap. Viewing angles are so bad just sitting in front of it puts you high enough to wash it out. Low res, bad colors, don't bother trying to eyeball exposure or color on this. - Interface is clunky, you can easily get the hang of it, but it's just not all that great. - Build quality feels really cheap. - Tried running Super 8 through it, way too much of a pixelated mess to really make out what it was, not worth it. Running negatives through this machine is pretty easy. The screen refresh rate is decent so you just line up the image, flip or reverse as needed, and then scan. The scanner is actively trying to cancel out the orange mask so color and exposure can vary just by moving the negative strip back and forth. Hitting the auto fix button in most programs will do a wildly better color correction job than this cheapo scanner could ever dream up. On a positive note, black and white negatives look great, no color to screw around with. It will never be perfect however because of a complete lack of Digital ICE or similar infrared technology seen in many high end film scanners and flatbeds. With some quick editing on the computer, you can totally make a usable image for basic sharing."
"If you are the sort who has a large collection of slides and wants to know the breakeven point between the cost of having a service scan your media or do it yourself, the average price for an outside service is in the 22-25 cent range per slide. If you need to scan over 500 slides this becomes the best value (assuming that the value of your time is not factored into the equation.). That is for slides - I did not check the cost of the other media this device will scan. At 14MP you can scan a little over 6500 slides, and at 22MP about 4100."
"The flat bed scanner can scan 12 frames at once without truncation and without having to line up each frame, and the resulting image color is accurate (without even having to mess around with color settings)."