Epson Perfection 4990 Photo Scanner by Epson
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Our Price: $899.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Epson Perfection 4990 Photo Scanner
Digital camera Review: Epson's Perfect Photoi Scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
Exceeds my expectations, both in ease of use and quality of output. I haven't yet used it for scanning slides and negatives, but look forward to the experience. Incidentally, I'm using it with Photoshop CS2 rather than the provided version.Digital camera Review: Excellant Scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
I have have had other scanners in the past, however this scanner is excellent. It is easy to use. You can scan 35mm slides, negatives from 35mm to 4x5's. You can also scan text or almost anything and get great results.The price is good. In all the reviews that I read before buying this scanner are accurate. It is a good scanner and when one compares a more expensive scanner (side by side) with the Epson 4990 there is no difference that anyone can really notice at all.Digital camera Review: Excellent Scanner and Included Epson Software
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent almost pro-quality scanner complemented by equally good software.
The scanner performs well. It sets up easily. It is fast and easy to use. Be aware, though, that it is a bit large. Primarily in height, compared to other scanners. Well worth the investment if you need to do high quality scanning easily.
The included Epson Scan software is also outstanding. You can do a preview, drag to create multiple selections, and then have the scanner automatically scan each area. Very helpful if scanning individual pictures mounted in an album. Epson Scan also has many easy-to-use adjustments built in so they can be done at the same time as the scan. Resizing, color restoration (simple and more complex with tone adjustment curves), removal of moire patterns, sharpening, and more.
The scanner also comes with an LE version of SilverFast. Epson Scan is far superior to the SilverFast LE version. I also feel no need to purchase the upgrade to the full version of SilverFast. EpsonScan is meeting my needs. Any more detailed adjustments on photos are best done in photo editing software (PhotoPaint, Photoshop, etc.).
The scanner also integrated well with OmniPage Pro (version 12 in my case) to scan documents for OCR.
Digital camera Review: Excellent in just about every way
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been looking for a way to scan slides and negatives and tried an Acer ScanWit a few years ago. But it was SCSI, could only scan four slides or one negative strip at a time and removing dust and scratches from the resulting images was really tedious. So I gave up pretty quickly and put the binders of negatives and slides back on the shelf.
Finally, last month I figured I'd try again. Read the reviews and settled on this scanner, mostly because a) I have a 5+ year old Epson 1640SU that I've been happy with; b) prefer Firewire over USB2 because there are no bandwidth-sharing issues (long story); 3) it claims to have Vista support.
Turns out the Vista support is kind of a an illusion: the software in the box is for XP, but I did manage to download a Vista TWAIN driver for this scanner from the Epson website. That may change in the near future, but it's a little misleading when you're expecting an out-of-the-box experience.
I never did get the SilverFast software to work on Vista and couldn't figure out from the SilverFast website if I could qualify for a free upgrade. So that leaves kind of a bad taste, but...
This scanner is wonderful, and even the Vista issues aren't grounds for removing even 1/2 a star. So far, I've scanned the 600+ slides from the 1980s (that went surprisingly fast even though it only does 8 at a time) and I'm on my first binder of negative pages and the counter is up to 915 images as I write this. I have Photoshop CS3, but I find it more convenient to scan using ACDSee, which is what I use to organize the 60GB of digital photos that these slides and negatives will be stored in. I'm scanning both 35mm slides and 35mm negatives at 3200DPI, which is equivalent to a 10mp digital camera. I am converting to low-compression JPEG (the resulting TIFFs and PNGs are absolutely huge and I didn't see much difference after converting to JPEG), and each image is about 2MB after conversion. Scans take a long time: with Digital ICE turned on, it takes about 6 minutes per slide or negative. It can scan 8 slides or 24 negatives at once, but my negatives are cut into strips of four images, so the actual rate is 16 negatives at a time, with an occasional straggler.
So I normally mount the slides/negatives in their holders and do a preview scan, which takes about 30 seconds. The Epson software nearly always frames the slides/negatives correctly. I then rotate the individual images in the preview window if necessary, check "color restoration" for slides that have faded (a great feature that does a fantastic job--I haven't had to use it on negatives, but definitely for many of my slides), then select all and check "DIGITAL ICE Technology" and "Medium unsharp mask". I've scanned many images with and without ICE and it makes a world of difference. Scans take twice as long with ICE enabled, but I don't really care since this is a long-term project and I'm not waiting for the results and it's so much faster than removing dust/scratches manually with Photoshop.
The only flaws in images I've seen are a lot of grain in some slides, which is a problem with the slide and not the scanner -- I rescanned with grain reduction turned on, which did an amazing job. A worse problem: some of my negatives are curled, and I'll occasionally get a moire rainbow pattern horizontally down the middle of the worst negatives -- usually those at the right end of the strip, the furthest from the supporting edge of the holder (I wish the holder clamped the negative between transparent panes, but it just kind of floats there). I've been able to compensate by rotating the negative 180 degrees and rescanning the worst cases, but most of the time it wasn't a great image to begin with and I didn't care and it wasn't worth the time to rescan it (I can fix it in Photoshop if I do care).
I've also scanned a few prints with outstanding results, especially in dark areas. The ICE for prints doesn't work as well as the ICE for slides (it appears to be a different technology) and I've had it mistake features in the print itself as a flaw. But I found it's safe to run it at the lowest setting as long as I inspect each scan and rescan without ICE if there's a problem.
I'm still using my old Epson 1640SU for documents (it has a sheet feeder) but I did scan a few pages with the 4990. At 300DPI or 600DPI, it's much faster than the 1640SU (actually, it's amazingly fast) and works well with Paperport. A feeder would be nice, but for the $200+ that would cost (if Epson even offered it), you could pick up a cheap scanner dedicated to office functions, or even an all-in-one printer.
So there you have it. I consider the complaints minor and see no reason that this scanner deserves anything less than five stars.
Digital camera Review: Excellent scanner
Summary: 5 Stars
This scanner is the sharpest, user-friendly and fastest flat bed scanner I have ever used.