Epson Perfection 3490 Photo Scanner

At under $100, this scanner was a great buy for me. I wanted to scan my slides and negatives and needed to replace my old HP Photosmart Slide scanner (2400 DPI) which uses a SCSI card with ISA slot and is not possible to use with my new computer.

The delivery from Amazon was fast and I was impressed with the looks - solid and smooth. The Epson scan software was nice too with all the standard histogram and curves controls. Unfortunately, the Photo Impression software was not up to mark, as it crashed a couple of times and then I discarded it. I never used the Bizcard tool.

However, I soon realised it will never replace a standard slide scanner. The scans of Slides at 3200 DPI produce JPEG files of size only 700 KB. It must be doing a lot of compression, as my 5 MegaPixel camera produces 2MB JPEG images. There is no option of getting an uncompressed scan. Also it auto detects the slide frames and that crops the frames sometimes. But there is no option of selecting the frames myself, which the HP software had. Scans are noisy and the scanner takes much longer time than the HP, which used to take about 1 min per frame, and this takes 4 min per scan at full resolution.

I gave 3 stars as although it takes good scans, there is a lot more data that can be extracted from the slides to get a great scan (not the ultimate scan that can be extracted from a Nikon Slide Scanner). But at this price not much more can be expected from the hardware, although some improvements can be expected from the software.

I have hundreds of slides that need to be catalogued and saved from fading to red. Now, with this scanner, the slides are being turned into digital images that can be saved on a CD without any trouble. Color, clarity and detail is terrific. This is a good tool and does what it says it can do.

Under Win XP the device installed quickly and seamlessly. The buttons on the front of the unit allow for a one-stop scan or more sophisticated features are accessed with the included software.

As typical from Amazon, delivery was excellent. Product worked right out of the box. Excellent software included and due to TWAIN, can be used with any application that allows access to scanning.

Large and small photos, gray scale or color, scan perfectly. Conversion from and to slides and film strips could be a bit less involved. Speed is average. A great buy for the money.

After reading numerous positive reviews of this scanner, both on Amazon and elsewhere, I decided to get it to do film negative scanning at home. So far I've been very happy with it. I just have a few warnings/caveats for others:

1. Having a cat, I have major dust problems in the house. You may think your flatbed scanner is clean, but when scanning 24mm x 36mm film negatives at 2400DPI you find a different story. Keep a can of compressed air around just like you were in the dark room developing prints.

2. The negative scanner works by inserting your negatives into a special removable holder that you place on the flatbed, and the hood contains a strip of backlighting. I cut all my negatives into strips of 5 frames, to fit my 5x7 film negative holding sheets. The maximum number of frames you can scan at once, however, is 4. This means that I have to insert the film one way, scan those, and then pull the negatives and reinsert to scan the last one. Often the fifth photo isn't worth scanning, but perhaps you're a better photographer than me.

3. The scanning software itself is not very adept at autodetecting frame edges. I'm not really sure why it would cut a 24mm x 36mm negative down any smaller, but time and time again it does that. The only way I've found around this is to scan in "normal" mode, which scans the entire strip of 4 frames into one image file which I then have to cut into different files in Photoshop.

It's a great, cheap way to get my film pictures into digital form. Instead of developing prints expensively (time- and money-wise), I can get a roll of C-41 film developed in one hour to negatives only for $2.00 at CVS, go home and cut them and have them scanned in far less than an hour.