EpsonB11B178061 Perfection V750-M Pro Photo Scanner

Epson V750 Pro ReviewThe scanner itself and the quality of scans appear to be excellent. I had my first scan (from a print) completed in less than an hour after the unit arrived and the output was very good. Going from there to doing real work was a bit more convoluted. Note that I purchased this unit to archive digitally about 70 years of film (my fathers as well as my own - dating back to the 1930's). My review speaks almost entirely to scanning film - color, B&W, transparency, 35mm, 645, 6x6cm, 4x5in, etc.The scanner physically is a nice size and fits on my desk well (but it is a pretty big desk). It's got reasonable weight and does not seem to slide around. Like almost every piece of equipment built today it is on the flimsy side. In an office setting it should work fine. If you have children or pets around I'd be careful to keep them 10 feet or further from the unit. I will be ordering spare negative carriers - they are really light weight and I expect to wear them out. The UPS cable that comes with the unit is at best undersized. It barely reaches under the desk to the PC - and that with some routing short-cuts. You would think that the connection cable would be about as long as the power cable - but not on this unit. I'm going to need an extension cable.The software and what seems to pass for documentation cause the most concern on this unit. I'm sure there are some great features buried in the software. Unfortunately the on-line manual is at best cryptic and often just lacking any real information. You do need to set up a LOT of configurations and play with the settings to get what you want. It took me about 3 days to come to a solid decision on how to scan my 120 roll film negatives. 85 test scans on 1 negative to finally compare just what was the best for me and this situation. The documentation with the unit was of no value here at all. Note that scans of a single frame can take from 5 seconds to 10 minutes - depends on the settings. Color save is sometimes useful but must be evaluated frame-by-frame. Ice technology is, in my situation, worthless. It jumped scans at the chosen resolution from 10 minutes per 8-shot carrier up to about 2.5 Hours for the same scan. And the resulting scan had no less dust, but did contain ripple-distortion and excessive pixilation. (I found I had a LOT better results with dust by just using the bulb-blower that I have for my camera.)The bundled software ranges from good to worthless. The standard Epson Scan package is what I am choosing to use. It recognizes single frames and automatically creates the files. It seems to have the features necessary to scan negatives very well. As previously noted documentation is pretty weak. It is also occasionally just wrong (i.e. AutoExposure - does not work as described).I did not install Photoshop Elements. I use Photoshop CS6 - and for this level of scanner if you don't already have a full-function photo editing suite then it's too much scanner for your needs.The package contains SilverFast SE Plus 8. I'm not sure what it's good for. Probably single-scan documents but clearly NOT film. It can't recognize individual frames, barely adjusts, and is just not that useful. The documentation for this - both on-line and the booklet (which happen to be the same thing) mostly cover "it's best to use the automation". I thought the Epson documentation was week. This is pretty close to non-existent. The license also claims to disavow international trade treaties and require conflict resolution in Germany. My home state voids this so I didn't really care - but it's a pretty bad license agreement.There is a package called i1Scanner that contains the equipment to make a profile for the scanner. I did not install it. The license required me to agree to excessively intrusive practices like allow physical inspection in my home, allow them to install what I think of as spyware, and other restrictions. The scans look just fine without the "tuning" this might provide. If you really need a custom profile then you probably should step up to a $10K drum-scanner or something of that quality.The Epson software, drivers (for Windows 7 64bit) were just plug in and go.Scan times can be excessive, but with experimentation I found that they are reasonable - under 15 minutes for each set of 8 frames of 645 negatives in the holder - when all the correct adjustments are made. File size can get nuts. I settled on a 435M file that will reproduce nicely at 18x12 inches. Higher dpi can easily push the file above 4GIG! per frame. Low dpi is pretty worthless for archiving. I noticed that under 1200 dpi and even 4x6 prints are excessively grainy.On a 0 to 10 scale I'd give the hardware itself about an 8 (beefing up the hinges, some metal in the critical path, stronger negative carriers would be needed to move to 10). The scanner operation is a solid 9, maybe even a 9.5 (real documentation that made the functions obvious would finish that off). Documentation is around a 3 - it would take a lot of effort to make it worse. Bundled software about a 3.I'd easily recommend this to anyone doing high-end amateur or most professional work with film. As a flatbed document scanner it's way over-kill. For casual home-user it's a LOT of scanner. Looking at the cost of drum-scans or photo-store scans this is a fantastic way to take old (and new) film stock over to digital. Overall I'm glad that I got this unit.

Have been scanning my own film since the first HP PhotoSmart scanner came out back in the 1990s. For the past 10 years, have been using an Agfa Duoscan T2500 (2500 dpi optical). However, due to its SCSI interface and lately some color quirks in the scan data, have been seeking a replacement/upgrade.Purchased the Epson V750 after closely studying the reviews here and the detailed external review. After using the Epson for a couple weeks now, I can say that I am not surprised at its performance but still a little disappointed in the delivered scan resolution compared to the specifications. In multiple testing using positives and negatives, film holder and flat glass, film-height adjusters (middle setting always the best), and regardless of the resolution selected for the scan, the actual detail present in the scans is not much greater than that delivered by the old Agfa Duoscan at 2500 dpi. That is to say, lots of pixels and large scan files but not the "information per pixel" that would correspond to "true" optical densities like 4800 or 6400 dpi. On the other hand, the Epson scan files do sharpen very nicely with Photoshop USM. After sharpening, I then use Photoshop's image size function to reduce the resolution down to 3200 dpi for efficient storage.A month back I had a roll of Kodak 160NC processed and premium-scanned by a professional lab. This was partly to have an independent benchmark for scanner comparisons. The resulting scans looked very very good at a calculated scan density of about 3500 dpi. Conducting a very careful scan with the Epson, I was able to obtain a (post-sharpened) image file not quite as good as, but very close to, the professional scan.Regarding the accompanying SilverFast AI software (which I've used exclusively for my testing and scanning), the delivered version is fully licensed and activated once you enter the product key found on the CD sleeve. Note this version is locked to the Epson scanner. Also note that LaserSoft Imaging (publisher of SilverFast) has created a product structure with countless options and SilverFast AI is not by any means the top end of their line. One missing option that would be very nice to have is Multi-Exposure. The options are available as upgrades to the basic SilverFast AI package, for a price of course. All that said, SilverFast AI is a very capable scanning package and I've been quite happy with it.I also used the accompanying EZcolor calibration package to create an input profile for the Epson. This was a straightforward procedure and did result in an improved color accuracy as judged by comparing the original scan of the supplied standard color target with the profiled scan.In summary, the Epson V750 with the supplied software is a fine, relatively affordable solution for film scanning enthusiasts. Actual resolution of details delivered to the image files is probably in the low 3000's - a useful resolution for 35mm frames and more than adequate for larger film sizes.