Epson Perfection V600 - scanners (12800 x 12800 mm, Flatbed, USB 2.0, 10 - 35 °C, 6400 x 9600 DPI, CCD)

I was very unhappy with the scanning of my artworks, on which I put a lot of effort in terms of the detail, the technique and the colours, only to have my ordinary scanner-printer-copier downgrade them on all those things.So I investigated scanner for artworks and I came across this one. It definitely scans so much better than the 3-in-1 copier-scanners. In fact, the reproduction of detail is so good that now I have to be careful with little errors that did not appear on the previous scanner images!Besides, it has got several adjustments you can make on colour, definition, contrast and the like. This allows you to tweak the settings gradually until you get the ideal combination of them and then you save them for all subsequent scans.But....yes, only one disadvantage: The scanner is an old model and WiFi was not even available for it. So you have to connect it with the old USB cable and the computer often struggles to make the connection with the scanner, even with the cable. Sometimes I even have to restart the computer and the scanner in the hope that they will see each other.As the quality of scanning is more important than the convenience of wireless communications, for me, I am prepared to live with this small inconveniences.

I’m very happy with this product. Easy to set up. I use it very regularly to scan/digitise my artistic illustrations.

There's an unusual thing. Ordered Friday 9/12/2022, was scheduled to arrive 22/12/2022-5/1/2023, but actually arrived in the wilds of Scotland Monday 12/12/2022. How often does THAT happen?! Full marks for prompt delivery at least!Since arrival it's been used fairly intensively with 2 Windows 7 laptops on a major project scanning a long history, going back to the reign of Queen Anne, of family documents and photographs, and it seems pretty good.As far as noise, speed, and weight are concerned, compared as a best case with a Canoscan LiDE 3/400s and as a worst case with an old but still working HP 5490C (Model C9850A) - for which I can't get 64-bit Windows drivers so has to be run by an XP or a Linux machine, and which makes a woeful grinding noise as it begins each scan, probably when registering the end of its travel as an 'origin' - this Epson is neither as quiet nor as fast nor as light as the Canoscan but a LOT quieter and faster and somewhat lighter than the HP.As foretold by other reviewers, the Windows software is unacceptably clunky, and gives the impression that it's old 32-bit NT era software Heath-Robinson-ed to work in a 64-bit environment, with all the dodginess that would naturally follow from that ...One of the most maddening things is that important settings - such as the use of ICE dust removal, etc - are associated with a particular selection rectangle in the preview window, and with each new selection there you create, you have to apply all those settings again, which is very easy to overlook, and then you find that you've done possibly quite a number of scans with the wrong settings and you can't remember when you last checked the settings and how far back you have to repeat your work. Particularly since these settings are in a scrollable panel so that you can't see all of them at once, this is utterly infuriating, and frankly unacceptable.The next most maddening is that occasionally the software loses contact with the scanner. I'm not sure that my fix below is optimised, some of the steps may be redundant, but so far the following has always worked:* Switch off the scanner, the low voltage power button on the side is sufficient, you don't have to switch it off at the mains.* Go into Task Manager and kill ...wiawow64.exe - Thunking WIA APIS from 32 to 64 Process... and any other Epson scan stuff that may be there, whichprobably depends on exactly how and what was happening when contactwith the scanner was lost.* Go into Computer Management, Services and Applications, Services and stop the Epson Scanner Service, if it wasn't stopped in the previous step.* Restart the Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service.* Start the Epson Scanner Service.* Switch on the scanner, wait for it to complete its startup sequence and some few seconds more, and then try again.As for the hardware itself ...One important limitation is that, AFAIK, it isn't possible to remove the lid to scan very large documents piecemeal, so I still have to do those with the HP. With this Epson, the transparency lighting unit is in the lid, and it's powered by a captive lead from the lid into the back of the body, while with the HP, there is a similar lead for the ADF unit on top of the lid, but which can be unplugged from the back, allowing the entire lid to be removed.One particularly annoying thing with every single scanner that I've ever owned, including this one, is that the edges of the window don't coincide with the edges of the scanning area, and, even worse, are usually ever so slightly offset from them by a small angle, meaning that if you do the naturally simple thing of abutting a document against one edge of the glass, you lose a strip of it that isn't scanned down that edge, and any line of print on the page, or the borders of a photo, are at a slight angle to the selection rectangles in the software. It would be nice if scanner hardware makers would finally acknowledge that these are serious problems requiring solutions, perhaps by giving us some form of adjustment to ensure that the edges of the window can be set exactly parallel or perpendicular to the scanner head's line of travel, and to coincide exactly with the edges of the area scanned.One partial fix is to abut documents against the top edge, where the area lost is minimised. Another is to use a plastic ruler down one edge, abut the photos or documents up against that, then lift it smartly away without disturbing them, but this is much more tedious compared with simply abutting a document against the edge of the glass. Further, both these solutions only minimise or fix the problem of the loss of a strip down one edge, not the slight angle problem.Despite all the above, actually the results are pretty good ...I'm particularly pleased with its scanning of old 120 film negs and slides, which is *MUCH* better than the HP, which couldn't fit them in its XPA unit, so you had to lay them flat on the glass, and either choose a strip from the middle, or do them in two halves and join the results together in software, a desperately fraught business. Unlike the HP, except where the slide has been physically damaged, there are no Newton's rings/Moire patterns which were the curse of my previous 120 scans.Other old childhood negatives from a Brownie Starmite camera also scanned very well, even to the point of automatically correcting the colour flaring with age that had marred the colour negatives taken with this camera - in the two scans of the same negative above, taken from the hydro dam at Pitlochry in the 1960s, that with the purple cast (loss of green) was scanned by the HP, the more natural looking one by this Epson.35mm negatives and slides scanned really well at 1200 dpi. In time I think I will probably rescan my entire collection of these, but in the midst of this major project I'm too busy right now.ICE dust removal works well on all the above colour films both negative and positive, even though I rather think some of the slides were Kodachrome, which it's supposed not to be able to handle, but it fails miserably on B&W negatives and colour prints. However, the conventional dust removal option at a medium setting seems to work quite well for those.Documents scan well, but I haven't tried any OCR options yet.All in all, although the Windows software badly needs fixing, I think, given the excellence of the photographic results, I can recommend this scanner despite that blasted software.