Epson Perfection 3170 Photo Scanner

just got the scanner. it's my first one. I reasearched which is the best in my price range and this is it. It scans relatively quick if you set the resolutions low if you set them higher it does take a while about 3-5 minutes. I scanned a photo at 300dpi and enlarged it and printed and it looks fantastic, excellent quality. I tried the negatives and that was fine too. I highly reccomend it if you are into photography.

I got this scanner last year as a christmas present for myself, and its a great scanner for the desktop. Capable of 48 bit colour scans and 16-bit gray scale, with automatic photo finishing effects, it's great. As a desktop scanner, it's excellent. However it comes with these slide adapters for scanning slides. That's not so great. I've had mixed results with this, some slides come out great... and others, not so much. But for what I mainly use this scanner for, documents, business cards, artwork which I need to stitch together and photographs, its an excellent buy. However if you're getting this for the adapters... err, look at the real slide scanners for that, they will undoubtedly do a better job. That's not to say I don't like the scanner.. I do!

I bought this in the hopes I could retire my HP Photosmart S20, a 2400dpi film scanner. With 35mm film the 3170's results are quite a bit worse than the S20--I'd say the 3170 scan is even lower in sharpness and overall quality than the S20 at 1200dpi. The lack of sharpness appears similar to what you'd get using a bad lens, like on a $10 throw-away camera--that is, in there somewhere is the core of a sharp image, within a basically mushy image. Even 8x10 prints aren't good at all, compared with the S20.

Otherwise, it's fine as a flatbed: the interface works, and I haven't had any problem. Scanning larger film for the web is OK, too. It just doesn't cut it for scanning 35mm for prints.

This is my first scanner, very easy to operate, well pleased with the results. Scanning text and pictures a real pleasure. Anxious to go through old family photos and download to PC. I'm a novice and really appreciate the ease of operation and results, certainly recommend!

I bought this scanner last week.

While installing the software it seemed to totally stall while installing one of the pieces of software (business card reading).
The disk reader was cycling on and off and nothing happened for what seemed to be a long time. I called customer service and got several pieces of advice which actually didn't help. After several tries I decided to go and have dinner. Lo and behold when I came back it had installed. So you just have to be REALLY patient.

The lack of a Users Guide is a definite disadvantage. Photo scanning was easy. It took me 2 evenings and half of a Saturady to be really comfortable with scanning negatives. The results are pretty good quality now. After trying all 3 scanning modes I now use Professional (even though I'm not a professional photographer).

The OCR software is great. I scanned in several recipes from a newspaper and it only had difficulties with the "quarter" and "half" symbols. I editied those and I was on my way.

On to scanning transparencies next - I don't expect it to be much different than scanning negatives.

For the price I think this scanner is a great deal. You just have to be prepared to expend some energy in getting familiar with how the software works. Luckily I haven't had the hardware problems people have reported. The glass plate was spotless. And it hasn't broken down (yet). I did notice that it was getting rather hot after I scanned one film so I turned it off to let it cool down and give it a rest :-)