Epson Perfection V350 Photo Scanner (B11B185011)

I bought this scanner last week and am absolutely amazed at the quality for scanning and fixing old photos, negatives, and slides. The color restoration is incredible. It restored the color in some old photos of my father's cars from the '50s and '60s--boy was he pleased.

I have Windows XP and it plugged in and operated perfectly.

The directions for loading items to be scanned are a little iffy and it took some experimenting to get it right.

NOTE: if you are doing old negatives from Kodak 110 or 120 cameras you have to trick the negative reader by putting them in the slide holder. It is a pain, but it will work.

NEGATIVE: won't take odd size slides; sometimes the "program" edits out parts of the negative and slide that you don't want out. Again, some moving around tricks the program and I could eventually get it. I don't know why these companies don't just scan the whole thing and let ME crop out the parts I don't want. My old HP drove me nuts doing this.

The scanner is slow for large files, but I don't have anything to compare it to. My old one was slow also, so that seems about normal.

I want a scanner that does large format negatives, but am afraid that any other one wouldn't be so user friendly or do as good a job. This one is GREAT.

I have always been a fan of Epson printers and I have always heard very good things about their scanners, so when I saw this scanner I had to have it. It has some pretty impressive features for an inexpensive scanner (slide and negative scanning with automatic negative feeder, high resolution, great color depth, and my favorite: scan to pdf). I have to say that it does produce great scans of prints, but at higher resolution the scan becomes somewhat grainy. I have been getting great results scanning larger prints (5x7 or 8x10) at lower resolution (600 to 1200 dpi), but I sometimes wish I could get equally good results at the highest resolution so that I can crop away and still have high resolution results. I am also disappointed in the quality of negative scans - they come out far too grainy (you need to scan negatives at higher resolutions in order to capture all the detail). But I don't plan on scanning too many negatives so this isn't a real big deal to me. My conclusion is: this is a good, inexpensive scanner with some nice features, but don't let the impressive resolution fool you - you can't take full advantage of it anyway.

I purchased this product at a time when I was very busy. After a few weeks I had a chance to unpack and begin using the scanner but after only about 10 scans, the scanner bar began to slip so badly that the scanner became unusable. I was unable to return it because of the 30 day limit and now it is in the limbo land of a computer repair center in North Carolina. A huge waste of $130 for me.

I have a huge inventory of 35mm film accumulated over 40 years of shooting. I bought a high-end negatve scanner in order to digitize some of this inventory (like most photographers, only about 1 in 15 is worth saving). The process got very bogged down because my negatives are separated from the prints and it's very difficult to judge which of the negatives I want to scan. And scanning them all is too time-consuming and consumes huge amounts of disk space because this scanner operates at 5400dpi. I was therefore searching for a quick and easy way to do preliminary scans and make contact prints from which I could select the ones I wanted to run through the high-res scanner. This scanner attracted me as a possible solution because of the capability of auto-loading and scanning film strips. It hasn't really been a good solution as the film feeder is flimsy and quite fussy (it won't take a film strip with a tag on it, for example, and the original Kodak processing tag is on all of these rolls) and it's very slow.
For a general scanner this is quite a good machine and it's close to plug-and-play; also seems to be a very good value so I would recommend it highly for someone who needs to do occassional film strip scanning or just general scanning.

Decent product. Cool auto feed function to scan 35mm negatives. Great feature is direct scan to PDF format and email function. Understanding all the options takes some time. 'Best' selection of options for scanning for YOU requires a little experimentation. For those not so inclined, there are four basic (simple) selections to choose from.