Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner (B11B198011)

Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner (B11B198011)
by Epson

List Price: ~~$199.99~~
Our Price: $179.99
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Category: CE
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Digital Photo Product Details

Manufacturer: Epson
Model: B11B198011
Color: Black
Product features:

Create extraordinary enlargements from film
Remove the appearance of dust and scratches from fi lm
Remove the appearance of tears and creases from photos
Restore faded color photos with one touch
Scan slides, negatives and medium-format panoramic fi lm

Accessories:

Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner (B11B198011)

Customer Review: The good and the bad
Summary: 3 Stars

The good:

The scanning resoultion is exceptional for the price.

The scanner hardware and epson software work well with an old Mac G4 cube. (With the exception of the Adobe Photoshop Elements noted below.)

The color correction works well on different kinds of color negatives and prints.

There is no warm-up time. The scanner can be used immediately after turning on.

If "unsharp mask" is used, the focus works very well, even if the negatives curl slightly so that the center of the negative is closer to the scanner glass thatn the rest of the negative. It also focuses very well if the negatives are placed directly on the scanner glass. The images do not show any distortion, even if the negatives have a little curl, as long as they are in the holder.

The bad:

The bundled Adobe Photoshop Elements software is useless if you are scanning with an older Mac. It will not install.

The scanner I received has some sort of goo, perhaps adhesive, on the inside of the glass. It is not in the scanning area for negatives, but it shows up on prints. Epson was willing to take the scanner back and refund my money, but getting the unit to a repair center would have been at my expense, even though they would cover the cost of the actual repair. I chose not to bother because I had an immediate need for the scanner for a project on a tight timeline. Since I was only scanning negatives for the project, I just kept using the unit. I have heard that a repair would introduce dust into the unit, and once the unit is opened, it may require repeated cleaning of the inside of the glass. I consider myself fortunate that there is no dust inside the unit, and I am just going to leave it alone.

The glass scanning surface is set slightly lower than the rest of the scanner bed. This makes it impossible to do any large format scanning of pictures larger than the scanner glass. On many other scanners, you can scan large pictures in pieces, and put them together in photoshop. That is not possible with this scanner.

The negative holders are flimsy, and the medium format negative holder does not hold the negatives securely. If the negatives are in very good condition, this is not much of an issue. If the negatives are curled, it is necessary to place them directly on the scanner glass and place another piece of glass on top of them to hold them down. The scanner software will not recognize the negative sizes in this case, so the marquees have to be added manually. This is not difficult.

Sometimes the software does not correctly recognize the negative sizes. If you need to reduce the scan area within a negative, that is easy to do, but sometimes it does not correctly recognize where a negative ends, and the pictures are broken into meaningless fragements. When this occurs, there is no easy way to override the software and put in marquees manually unless you remove the negative holder and redo the preview of the negatives set directly on the glass.

Everything looks slightly out of focus unless unsharp mask is used. This bothers me because it should be possible to scan photos and negatives without unsharp mask. I have heard that adjusting the height of the negatives will help get them into focus, I have not had any luck varying the heights to get better focus. Artifical sharpening would not be necessary if the scanner would focus correctly.

Epson technical support is absolutely horrible. Their sales staff do not understand the product line, and the technical support staff take forever to get back to you, and then have no more knowledge than the information on the Epson website.

"Digital ICE" can do very wierd things to images. On black and white negatives, it often removes the eyes. When it removes large scratches and tears from photos, it often makes a big smeared mess of the repaired section. Much better results can be achieved by taking the time to do these corrections manually in photoshop. I have had occasional very good results with this feature, but I very seldom find that it is worth using.

I am primarily scanning black and white negatives, but for color prints I have been having some difficulty with color. The reds have an overly intense quality, and the faces often have a reddish-pink tinge. I have viewed the images on several different monitors, and althought the images do not always look the same, the faces still often have a pink look to them. Since the color prints I am scanning are very old, and always require color correction, I am not sure whether it is the scanner calibration or the images that are the problem.

Conclustion:

Overall, this scanner has been very useful, within its limitations. I think it is worth the price, for what I have managed to produce with it. I would not buy this particular scanner again because:

I don't need "digital ICE".

The option of being able to scan large format negatives is more valuable than I originally realized. I have been either cropping them by only scanning a portion of them, scanning them in two pieces and putting them together (tedious in the extreme if you are doing more than a few), or putting them on a light table and photographing them (with much better results than I anticipated, but not quite as good as scanning.)

The fast warm-up time may not be worth the additional cost, and the LED lights instead of the fluoresecnt ones may be the cause of the color discrepencies between the original prints and the scanned images.

If you have a lot of negatives to scan, you are in for a long, tedious job, no matter what scanner you choose. I would suggest reviewing the scanned images shortly after doing the scans, so you don't end up with a large number of scans that have to be redone. Also, be selective. Don't bother trying to scan every negative you own, just for the purpose of digitizing an entire collection. It is better to take your time and get really good scans of the few pictures and negatives that are worth enlarging.

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