Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I purchased this excellent scanner after much frustration with two previous purchases which failed to perform: Canon CanoScan 4200F and the HP Scanjet 4890.
The biggest problem with scanners is not the hardware, but the software.
In the case of the CanoScan 4200F (and similar 8400 and 9950 models, which use the same software), the driver utterly fails to crop slides correctly: in the default 'auto-crop' mode, it cuts off parts of the frame but when 'auto-crop' is disabled, it fails to scan slides separately, forcing you to crop each one manually. What is worse, is that the driver does not remember your settings so you have to reconfigure every detail again, every time you scan. There are many other bugs in this driver too.
The Epson 4490, in contrast, is very sensible about cropping - it allows you to manually adjust cropping, if you like, or to disable it and simply scan each slide as a separate file, capturing the entire frame. This would seem simple enough since both the Canon and Epson scanners employ plastic slide holders to fix the position of the slides in relation to the scanner so the Epson software always knows how to reliably split multiple slides without cropping, whereas the Canon software simply gives up.
Another area where scanner software often fails is in the installation. The Epson installation procedure worked perfectly and did not even require a reboot to begin scanning. The HP 4890 installation was a complete disaster: the giant 'easy install' poster included with the scanner contradicted the installer on when to plug in the scanner: instructions explicitly said to connect the scanner prior to installing the driver, but when I actually ran the installer, it failed to connect and Windows failed to ever recognize the new hardware, even though the installer reported that I could connect the scanner later - which was not true. Even after uninstalling and re-installing and rebooting the HP driver (which took about 40 minutes), although the the scanner appeared to be recognized by Windows and was 'connected', the driver would simply hang forever when attempting to scan.
I recount this detail about the HP scanner because it is positioned very close to the Epson 4490 in terms of price and features, yet is completely unusable. In this regard, another important consideration is technical support: in the case of HP, phone support is strongly discouraged and hard to find - even if you do manage to find the phone numbers, the quality of HP support staff is abysmal, in my experience. Epson, in contrast, publishes the tech support phone numbers prominently on the instructions included with the scanner. Perhaps, Epson can more easily afford to divulge these phone numbers since products that work well require very little tech support. This made me feel quite confident with the Epson product.
Now the big payoff - scanning!
The quality of images you get is directly related to the ease of use in configuring the scanning software. Although the Epson software is not perfect, it is quite usable and powerful. It does a reasonable job of retaining configuration settings and the advanced features of 'dust removal' and 'digital ICE' image correction is very impressive.
The flaws in the software include the following.
1. The ability to 'save' settings is spotty: you cannot assign a name to saved settings; saved settings only configure half of the parameters, prior to preview - you cannot configure use of 'dust removal', 'digital ICE' etc but must manually assign these options on each scan.
2. The prefix used in assigning filenames to scanned images does not allow the valid windows filename character, '.'
3. 'Target size' parameter cannot be saved. Workaround is to use the image 'Resolution' parameter instead (resolution=2400 can be saved and is equivalent to resolution=300, target size=800%, for example).
I have only tested this scanner in scanning color slides so far.
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