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| Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner | 
 enlarge | Brand: Epson
Category: CE
List Price: $249.99
Buy New: $180.81
You Save: $69.18 (28%)
New (60) Used (3) Refurbished (1)
Avg. Customer Rating:  94 reviews
Color: silver
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 13.6
Dimensions (in): 7 x 15 x 21
nv:Scanner Type: Flatbed
Scanner Element: Epson MatrixCCD line sensor
Optical Resolution: 6400 dpi
Hardware Resolution: 6400 x 9600 dpi
Maximum Document Size: 8.5" x 11.7"
Color Depth: 48-bit
Gray Scale Depth: 16-bit
Interface Connectivity: USB 2.0
Power Source: AC Adapter
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: B11B189011
Model: B11B189011
UPC: 010343865372
EAN: 0010343865372
ASIN: B000VG4AY0
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Impressive, Big and Impressive, Very Impressive September 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I wanted a slide scanner because I've got a lot of slides 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.
To my surprise this thing scans photos as well. I don't know why, but I thought it was only a slide and negative scanner. So, 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
 Vista users BEWARE!!!!! September 24, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Do not believe the icon that says "vista compatible"....it isn't. Neither the software for the scanner nor the adobe photoshop 4.0, which came with the scanner, are Vista compatible. I've never had the difficulties in getting software loaded as I have with this. Can't even get the upgrades to download from the respective company's intenet sites. The scanner gets great reviews, but when the software isn't the right thing, the scanner is useless.
Good, but the color is sometimes way off wih negatives September 23, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Installing the software and hooking up the scanner was done with out a problem on Windows XP. Epson doesn't seem to have forced me to put as much software on my computer as a my Canon scanner.
I am going through Photoshop CS2 to start the scan. That way the scanned photo is open in Photoshop right after scanning so I can crop it or make whatever adjustments I want. Scanning takes a few minutes to scan 12 color negatives, probably about twice as fast as my Canoscan 8800F.
Some of my scans look great. With others the color is not so good. They are just really washed out, the color restoration setting, which is supposed to fix washed out photos doen't help (probably because there was nothing wrong with the photo in the first place). The same image looked ok with my Canon. However, scanning at the same DPI (1200) and comparing the same image at 100%, the scans on the Epson look sharper than the Canon.
The color being rather desaturated in some scans is really my only complaint about this scanner, and that can generally be fixed in Photoshop. Other than that, I'd say its pretty good for the current price.
Update 10/21/08
After doing a lot more scanning, it seems the only time I have issues with the color is with some of color negatives I scan. All my scanned prints have been looking great.
Nice scanner September 23, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I primarily picked up this scanner because I want to digitize my photos via their negatives. I was also pleasantly surprised by some of the other things that I can do with this scanner as well. But first: putting it together.
It's fairly easy to set up the scanner. Simply take it out of the box, plug in the plug to power the top of the unit (if you're using this to scan negatives, you'll need this backlight, for everything else you can keep it unplugged), plug in the power cord and get the USB ready. Note: there is a lock that covers the USB, probably to help protect it if you were going to be traveling a lot with you scanner (who would do that, I don't know, it's too big for easy travel), so you will probably have to slide that over so you could access the USB port. Be sure to take off all the blue tape, both outside of the unit as well as on the inside cover of the top. Also note that the inside top cover has a lock as well; this is for the scanner head, and you may have to unlock it prior to actually scanning (I did).
Before plugging in the USB to my computer, I installed the various driver and application components on the CD. This actually took a lot longer than expected. I have a fairly fast PC with a 52X ROM, and it took close to five minutes to install the various applications (Creativity Suite, FineReader 6.0 Spirit (an OCR program), the scanning application and the User's Guide). There is also an accompanying CD with Adobe Photoshop Elements (4.0 for Windows, 3.0 for Mac), but as a Photoshop CS3 user, I didn't bother to install this.
Registering the product is fairly easy. The unit's ID can be found on the back left of the unit. Be warned that you will be taken to a Web page offering a discount on an unrelated product with a big download button; you don't actually need the product and don't need to download more stuff.
Since I picked this primarily for scanning negatives, this was what I first tried with the unit. The scanner comes with two holder plates, and you can do 35mm film negatives and slides on one plate, and medium film on the other. I was scanning 35mm color negatives, and so I placed them in the appropriate holder and snapped on the top of the holder. Scanning the negatives straight away is fairly straightforward. You simply press the scan button on the front of the unit. This will start the Epson Scan application, and you'll be able to set various things that will allow you to get the best scan possible (more on this below).
I'm going to take a break here and detail the error I made in my first attempt to scan negatives so that you, kind reader, do not make the same mistake. After putting the negative holder on the glass, I removed the reflective back from the top of the unit to expose the light area (fairly simple to remove it and put it back on, even has a handy little handle at the top, too). What I didn't notice was that each section of the holder has a letter corresponding to where you should place the tab on the corresponding indent on the unit. 35mm negatives use the "A" section, and I had placed the holder on the "C" section. I kept getting an error message saying that it couldn't see that there was a document to scan. This confused me for a bit, and I wound up using the Home and Professional modes to see if I could get my negatives to scan. When I had unchecked the thumbnails feature for preview, I saw that only the slides area was being scanned. I then realized my error, and adjusted the position of the holder on the tab indents accordingly. The top unit only has a small glass area for the top light, and so the scanner, obviously, will only scan that small area. You can actually see this in the photograph of the unit on the Amazon page. Once I corrected my error, I had no problem scanning my negatives.
Back to the Epson Scan application. There are three options for you to choose from: Auto, Home and Professional. Auto simply auto-detects the type of document you are trying to scan and uses default settings to produce the preview of the document. Home and Professional are for photos and negatives. The difference between the two is that Professional provides you with more options to choose from so that you can get the best scan you require for your needs. Unless you're into heavily working your photos, your best bet is to go with the Auto feature.
Scanning photos and documents is also quite easy. You need to make sure that the reflective piece is on the top of the unit. This will also ensure that your document does not move around on the glass. Scanning, again, is simple as pressing a button.
I wanted to try out FineReader with this unit, as well as the PDF button. For FineReader, I loaded up the program, and pressed a button within it (Scan), to get the document scanned and loaded into FineReader. I was easily able to get the OCR to work nicely with the document without problem.
For PDFs, I simply pressed the PDF button. This brought up a different PDF-specific application with a different dialog than the scanning application. Because the unit does not have a feeder, you will have to manually scan individual pages yourself. Creating the PDF then requires you to simply press the finish button; the document is then placed in your My Pictures directory if you are a Windows user. It would be nice to be able to state where you want the file to save, but that's a minor flaw.
I also attempted to import a scan within Photoshop. I've done this before with other scanners, and Photoshop had zero issues with the scanner application, and everything worked smoothly.
There is a third button for email, by the way, however, I don't have email set up on my machine and so I did not test this feature out.
I'm very pleased with this product. I found the scans to be quite sharp, and the scan process to be intuitive. I can see a novice with scanners not having too much of a problem with this unit, save for the holder issue I discussed earlier.
Quick and simple September 10, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have now had the Epson V500 scanner for 2 weeks. I have scanned about 750 35mm slides, color negs and B&W negs and also 6x7 medium format color negs. The results are very good. For a $175 scanner I would say the results are outstanding. Other customers who are complaining about the scanner seem to have too little RAM memory to properly operate this scanner. It takes me about 4-6 min. to scan 4 35mm slides at 4000ppi, 48 bit and 100% scale using only the normal dust removal and not the digital ICE. The ICE is great for some slides and not so great for others and a disaster for B&W negs. However the normal dust removal option is good. This is a very simple scanner to operate, in fact, I don't see how it could be simpler.
I am very happy with this scanner.
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