Epson Perfection 1250 Photo Flatbed Scanner

I was looking for a reasonable priced Scanner for Photo's & Slides. I found the Epson Perfection 1250 Photo/Slide scanner to be what I was looking for. After reading the reviews I was a little hesitant because it said it was very complex to operate.
I ordered this scanner because it was reasonably priced and had what I required.
Upon receiving the Scanner I was totally impressed with the ability to copy 25 year old slides very well. The Epson Smart Panel makes it very easy to operate. I would highly recommend this scanner to everyone.
Also copies photos very nicely and fairly fast.
The only problem I had was loading the software for the scanner. This was caused by Norton 2002. Once I disabled the Norton 2002 software it was a breeze.
Try it you will like it.

First, it didn't work on my windows2000 at all.
Second, Got it working on my windows98 machine, but "copy" button never works, it always gave error message, (ironically my printer is an Epson Stylus 640). The worse is, you have to reboot your machine after seeing that error msg, otherwise windows can't find the scanner. Never tried film scanning, going to return it.

This scanner produces superior scans compared to other scanners in it's class. It is a little on the slow side, but the scans are worth the wait. Extremely easy to use with options to turn off auto-scanning or scanning manually from other programs like Photoshop. The slide adapter produces exceptional printable scans from pos. or neg. film. My scanner has no dust at all under the glass.

I bought and returned two of these honeys. Both were identical. They had dust under the glass, the colors looked like they came from a different spectrum, very noisy and s..l..o..w. Finally settled on the Canon N670U. 1000 percent better. It seems that a company that can make such excellent printers should be able to manufacture a decent scanner NOT! Save your money. Buy a Canon for less and go out to dinner on Epson with what you saved.

I've enjoyed the superb quality of my Epson printers & wanted to give them a try for my next scanner. For the price, you can't beat the quality of the scan or the fact that it includes a 35mm film adapter. But I do have a couple of issues that are serious enough for me to write about.

1) Dust. There was enough dust under the glass on the first unit I received to warrant exchanging it. Now that I have the 2nd unit, there is still dust (Epson quality control is lacking), but not as much. It is not at all noticable when scanning at 72dpi (for uploading to the web), but is *very* noticable on-screen when scanning at 300dpi or greater for printing. Fortunately, it is barely noticable when printed. I've not yet decided if this is enough for me to send it back again.

2) The Smart Panel software interface pops up randomly, and it's VERY annoying. Even if I haven't scanned anything since booting up, it will just open for no reason. Closing it does no good, it will open again. Minimizing it does no good, it will keep refreshing. Epson referred me to their 3rd party software vendor, NewSoft, where I found the following in their FAQ:

"ESP2-0013 Why the Smart Panel interface will pop up randomly?

The problem was due to the scanner driver detect the wrong hardware code to launch Smart Panel. Our development team are working on the issue. Please visit NewSoft website for further release notice, if there's any new Patch to cover this issue."

Great, no end in sight.

If not for these two significant bugs that should be easily remedied with a little Quality Control, it would be an unbelievably wonderful unit for the price.