Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner (B11B189071) Reviews
Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner (B11B189071)
- Quickly scan multiple documents
- Create extraordinary enlargements from film
- Remove the appearance of dust and scratches from film
- Scan slides, negatives and medium-format film
- Restore faded color photos with one touch
Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner
List Price: $ 349.99
Price: $ 286.17
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Anybody remember the 1958 movie, “The Fly”?,
Where the scientist ended up with his head spliced onto a fly’s body and was flying around saying “Help Me, Help Me”? That’s the V500 Office scanner. The base of the scanner is the V500 Photo scanner. The top comes from something else. They work together, but aesthetically they don’t exactly match…they aren’t even made out of the same color of plastic.
When you first open the box, you find a complete V500 Photo scanner and a separate Automatic Document Feeder. All of the setup instructions refer to the base unit. The sheet is labeled V500 Office, but the ADF unit isn’t illustrated or mentioned. (Step One: Unpack; Step two: Install Software; Step Three: Connect and turn on; Step Four: Scan a photo…etc…) When you’ve finished, you end up with a very nice photo scanner and the feeder still in its plastic bag. (The instructions are up on the Epson website…to install the feeder, you turn off and open the top of the scanner, unplug the wire connecting the top to the base, lift the top vertically and it will separate from the bottom. Two pegs on the feeder fit into matching holes in the base. Fold it down, plug the power/control wire into connector on the base and fit the horseshoe shaped wire into the tilted input tray. Turn it back on and you should be in business. The software is intelligent enough to detect the presence of the ADF unit and adjust accordingly.) Installation, though, is something that’s only done once…what’s really important is how well the scanner works. So, let’s go through the various parts…
Scanner Body – As I mentioned, the main body of the scanner is from the V500 Photo Scanner. Because it’s designed to scan negatives as well as pictures, it has a fairly high optical resolution and a decent, although not spectacular dynamic range (D=3.4, if you’re into the actual spec. The D value is a measure of how well a scanner can capture shadow and highlight detail…the higher the value the better. The V700 measures at D=4.0. Professional grade scanners can be substantially higher, while I’ve seen inexpensive units spec’ed as low as 1.8.) When using the glass platen, you can scan up to a standard 8.5″x11″ letter-size paper. Legal size pages can be scanned using the document feeder.
Automatic Document Feeder – The ADF holds roughly 30 sheets of paper for scanning. It’s strictly a single sided scanner. You’ll need to run the paper through twice if you need to scan both sides of a document and then merge the two files together. I’ve had some serious problems with the feeder. It’s common for it to pick up the top sheet off the stack, but then not feed it through the scanner. It also appears that the ADF has some other “unusual” features…this question, for example, is on the Epson website FAQ:
Q: The automatic document feeder pulls two sheets of paper when I click Preview. Can I make it pull only one sheet?
A: No.
It seems like the firmware needs a bit of updating. When it was working right, the ADF worked well. The scanning speed is dependent on the resolution and the speed of the computer that it’s connected to. The linearity seems pretty good, with my scans of graph paper showing only a few hiccups.
V500 Photo Scanner Lid – The photo scanner lid comes with holders for both slides and various sizes of negatives. The normal white reflective surface can be removed and replaced with one of the negative holders. This allows the built-in light source to shine through the negatives. You can scan two strips of 35mm film, 120 or 220 film and larger negatives. If somebody has an archive of old 4×5 view camera negatives, this will convert them to digital form, but, frankly, for that kind of work, you should use a scanner with a better dynamic range. You NEVER want to send photos through the ADF, they’re too likely to get scratched or mangled.
Software – Epson’s software package includes the Epson scanner driver and Abbyy FineReader 6.0 (the current version direct from Abbyy is 10.0). The scanner driver has three levels of complexity – Home, Office, and Professional. The Office level provides enough flexibility for almost every application and I always leave it there. I suspect that the other two levels are the result of some misguided marketing guy’s attempt to address different market segments. Files can be created as .JPG, PDF and a couple of other formats. For document scanning, I always use PDF. For photos, I use the lossless TIFF format to preserve as much of the original detail as possible. The Abbyy software works well in converting the scanned images into searchable PDF files, but won’t take an external PDF and make it searchable or convert it to a Word document…you have to purchase the new version to add those functions.
Service – Nothing works forever, but, after two weeks, I was not happy when the document feeder stopped…
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|Not So Perfect ADF,
I was hoping this scanner is a reasonable trade-off between an office scanner with ADF and a photo scanner. I ended up scanning mostly documents, since I have not found time to scan many of my negatives, slides or prints. So I only comment on document scanning.
When I use document table to scan single paged documents, it does decent job. The scan results appear soft, compare to other scanner, even I set the unsharp mask level to high.
My biggest complain is the ADF, it misfeeds all the time! Most time, it appears that the ADF cannot grab papers.
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|Big Machine, Big Results,
This is the same machine as the Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner which I reviewed last year, but with a document feeder. I didn’t think I’d ever need to feed a stack of documents into a scanner, but once in our home, my husband, who is a writer, all of a sudden decided he needed to get all his earlier (pre computer) work onto his hard drive. And he has a lot of that. This machine has been scanning and scanning and scanning and like that bunny with the drum or that watch that keeps on ticking, this machine just keeps right on working. If you have a of documents you want scanned, this is the way to go.
Below is my review of the Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner. It all applies to this machine.
I wanted a scanner that would do slides because I’ve got a lot of them my husband and I took four decades ago. We have no way to view them, other than to hold them up to a light, not very satisfactory. So, I was really looking forward to this.
When it came I was surprised at the size of it. This is a behemoth. I sort of pictured something much smaller, like those little photo scanners you see in the electronic section of Target. And you had to plug it into the wall, my Cannon scanner gets its power from the USB connection. Still, it was in my living room and I had those slides, so I lugged it upstairs, put in on my desk, put the CD into my computer, followed the simple directions and in no time I was good to go.
I put a photo in, pushed the button and the scanner went to town. Unlike my Cannon scanner and the HP scanner my husband has, this scanner does not work through a Photoshop plug in. That’s good, because there are no onscreen clicks I have to do to scan a photo. I just put it in, close the lid, hit a button on the scanner and voila!
I’m going to stop here and say that this machine makes some weird and kind of loud noises when it works. At first I thought it was broken, but no, that’s just the language it speaks.
I had the preferences set to 300 dpi and the machine did the job in about a tenth the time of our other two scanners. That was impressive. Next I loaded in four slides. To do that I had to put in the plastic slide tray and slide out the underside of the top of the scanner, so light can pass through the slides. The machine takes four slides at a time.
It takes a couple minutes for it to do the slides, but the output is fantastic. This beast is big, but it does the job and it does it very well, even if it groans its way through the work. I am very, very impressed.
Reviewed by Vesta Irene
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