EpsonPerfectionV300PhotoColorScannerBlack Price Review

Scan film, photos and 3D objects with amazing clearness and detail the value priced Epson Perfection V300 Photo makes it easier than ever with 4800 dpi optical resolution and a host of family friendly features. Use the fitted Transparency Unit to scan up to six negative frames or four slides at one time. With the scanner’s extraordinary resolution, you may be able to easily create surprising enlargements. And, if you want to bring those faded family photos back to life, you may be able to use the V300 Photo to easily restore the color. This versatile performer will include a high rise cover for scanning books and other 3D objects. And, it offers easy setup and one touch scanning. If you decide to archive vital papers or copy the soccer team photo, you may be up and running in no time. Best of all, with an groundbreaking, LED light source, the V300 Photo gives fast scans with no warmup time.

The Epson Perfection V300 Photo uses the groundbreaking ReadyScan™ LED technology

Restore the color in old, faded photos using Epson Easy Photo Fix®

ReadyScan™ LED technology
This energy efficient light source uses less power, while making sure greater productivity. And, there is no warmup time obliged. Best of all, with no mercury included, this LED technology is better for the environment. Photo restoration with Easy Photo Fix®
Dig out that shoebox full of old, faded photos and restore the color with one touch. Just lay your faded photo on the scanner bed and, with a simple mouse click, you may be able to bring those faded photos back to life. You will be amazed at how fast and easy it’s. With color restoration, Easy Photo Fix also will include Digital Dust Correction and Backlight Correction. What the press is saying: “Epson also equipped its newest addition with ReadyScan LED technology, which is more energy economical and requires no warm up time when in comparison to conventional mercury filled cathode fluorescent lamps used in scanners” Staff, Electronista (8.22.2009), take with permission from electronista.Com “.The Perfection V300 Photo, with its 4800 dpi optical scanning resolution and transparency scan support, is a good choice for those wanting to take their snapshots, negatives, and slides into the digital age.” James Galbraith, Macworld (10.21.2008)        




Scan 35mm slides and negatives with ease using the fitted Transparency Unit for beautiful enlargements up to 13×19

Create beautiful enlargements from 35mm slides and negatives
Use the fitted Transparency Unit to scan four mounted 35mm slides or six frames of 35mm film. With the Perfection V300 Photo’s 4800 dpi optical resolution, you may be able to create enlargements from your 35mm film from 4×6 to 13×19. One touch and Full auto scanning
The Epson Perfection V300 Photo features four one touch scanning buttons Scan, E Mail, Copy and PDF while the Epson Scan driver features four scan modes to accommodate users from beginners to experts. Full auto Mode gives auto scanning of photos, papers and film. Home Mode gives more control over scans with easy to follow settings menus. Professional Mode offers image correction tools for advanced users as well as histogram, tonal curves and a densitometer. New to the Perfection V300 Photo is Office Mode, which gives users functionality found in Epson’s document scanners as well as threshold control, text enhancement and color dropout. High rise 180 degree lid
Perfect for scanning scrapbooks, photo albums or 3D objects, this distinctive feature lets you to lift the scanner cover 180 degrees to accommodate oversized originals. Features/Benefits accomplish exceptional clearness and detail with 4800 x 9600 dpi optical resolution Scan 35mm slides and negatives with ease using the fitted Transparency Unit (for beautiful enlargements up to 13×19) Restore the color to old, faded photos with one touch Do more with one touch document scanning — send e mails or create PDFs Quickly copy papers and photos for archiving reasons Enjoy extraordinary versatility, plus completely auto scanning Scan books, photo albums and 3D objects with high rise, 180 degree cover Enjoy more economical operation with exclusive ReadyScan™ LED technology — no warmup time and fast scanning speeds Rest easy with LED technology — no mercury included and lower power intake improve your pictures with photo editing and creative software included Scan text with amazing clearness — Office Mode delivers sharp scans, if text is on colored paper or a double sided document

What’s in the Box
Epson Perfection V300 Photo scanner; Transparency Unit (built into lid); Film holder for 35mm film strips and mounted slides; CD ROM software; Start Here poster; Hi Speed USB 2.0 cable; AC adapter

351 of 358 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars Epson V300 Scanner, July 16, 2009
By W. Crews Giles (Texas) See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) This review is from: EpsonPerfectionV300PhotoColorScanner(Black) (Office Product) Epson V300 Photo

RATING
I can only give five stars when I have a comparison with my use of another scanner but I strongly suspect such a comparison could not change my opinion of this one. I’m happy, and it exceeds all my expectations. So, four stars and most likely five.

USES
I had two reasons for a scanner: My main function is to preserve long out of print and frequently rare history and theological texts, making them available to other scholars and researchers , it had to be a flatbed. The second was to preserve and share old photos.

Twenty four hours ago I bought this unit, led to this choice by reviews, and deciding established upon the LED scanning technology, the portability, the price and the bundled software. It cost me twenty dollars more (one hundred total) for the V300 which I believe is the same as the V30 except the V300 has the inclusion of the 35mm film and slide holding frame which I think may be of use to me.

MODES
I do not know why they use the terms they do for the modes of use. They ought to be: Photo mode, Text mode, Auto mode and Professional mode. Instead, Photo is called “Home”, Text is called, “Office”, Auto and Professional are what you could think. The menus are otherwise intuitive, but you may be able to (as I did) read the manual if you want.

PHOTOS
I started with photos. 300 dpi resolution is enough for all of my needs, but I tried 1200 to see what it could do. Using 1200 is 400 of original, and using that setting, and zooming in using common photo software, the detail was far beyond my expectations almost like a crime movie zooming in on the subject’s glasses to see the reflection of the photographer. Nearly. This is well beyond my needs, as I’m preserving photos as they are not photoshopping for enhancements. Still.

RESTORATION
I couldn’t resist trying the auto restoration. I began with the default setting of 300 dpi, which I’ll use across the board from now on simply because it’s more than adequate for my uses. I have a black and white family photo from the 1890′s, and I had to view the original under bright light to make out any detail, so faded was it. Seconds afterward, the preview image in “Home” mode” (see above) and leaving the default for “color photo,” showed a perfectly balanced contrast, popping out detail my eye couldn’t detect in the original. Excellent.

I then took a 1941 color portrait, and left the settings in “Home Mode” 300 dpi, and “color restoration” checked. The original’s color has been skewed, nearly no red left over. A push of the button and the image burst out in what I believe must have been the original colors. Excellent.

The last photo test was of a snapshot of me in which the flash had made my skin appear pasty white, while I was really quite tan. I used the Professional Mode and played with the controls removing some red, removing green on the intuitive graph display for that function, and playing with the other controls for not many seconds ensuing in a good last product.

TEXT
Scanning whole books into pdf files is my major use. But I tested more than that.

OLD NEWSPAPWER CLIPPING
My 1st test was really a ninety year old newspaper clipping. Using “Office” mode, I did nothing but preview , then scan. The software did its thing and possibly a minute afterward I had opened the pdf document using acrobat (the free version) and the image was an exact copy. I used the text choose tool in Acrobat to choose the complete article , then pasted it into MS Word. The supplied OCR software (ABBYY FineReader Sprint Plus) had done a just job for a free bundled product and a awful ink speckled original (like all newspaper print in hose days). The pdf file was perfectly readable as it was. The capability to search ad find particular words and phrases could be easily seen in the variant of what I copied from the pdf file , then pasted into Word. The result was good enough to seem right to my eye and brain to read it, but the ink speckle from the original showed up as different characters, and quite some “are enn” showed as “emm” also many other common OCR scanning errors. It was along way from being usable for citing directly perhaps ten minutes of clean up for that one full column of news print.

My second test was old newspaper but preserved in a scrap book. There were four things on the page I tested, and in “Office” mode, I simply selected the four parts of the page that included the real clippings in the preview pane (the selection is easy, fast and called a “marquee.” I could call it a “cropping selection tool.” Then I clicked all, and all four boxes bordering the four clippings were selected. Next, I selected pdf as the output file type from the file folder icon on the major window, , then selected scan. Again, the software did its thing. I received a four page pdf file, a page for each selected item. The results of the image and the OCR test were the same as before.

BOOKS
Finally, I scanned a single page from a old textbook with a rather uncomfortable to read font. Using the same settings as before, the pdf file was perfect, and the OCR work was far better. A proofread and some mistakes on that one page. Still, that’s more editing than I’ll want to do, but that’s a software upgrade not related to the hardware. The software lets you to scan each and all page into a single pdf document if you like, and which I’ll make use of.

OCR SOFTWARE
I am happy with the product, and happy the low end OCR software worked better than I feared as I’ll dont have problem upgrading that software to a professional level for a hundred dollars or so within my budget. For now, from the text, requiring more editing than I’ll want to do, it was, none the less, readable. Our eyes and minds will see thnouglre the eniors and quickly correct as we read! The real density of errors was reasonable for a starter variant which is what is included. Og course the OCR software has nothing to do with the perfect image of the pdf file it only impacts searching that pdf file for particular words and phrases. I’ll add that the capability to search a text using Acrobat that I already have is the same as the scanned pictures on many of the research sites I use. I want the search capability for indexing and hyperlinking inside the last pdf file. I’m told that Adobe’s product will supply that capability and the high OCR accuracy that I need.

OVERALL
There are more features, other software included, but for my reasons. My expectations were far exceeded by what has been delivered a delight to have such easy and fast success. My two unknowns are 1) results of my upgrade to more powerful OCR software, and 2) the longevity of the scanner unit.

I do wish the software could let me to name the current scan more easily. The default is to use serial ordinals, so that my scanning project folder is just img001.Jpg, img002.Jpg, and so on. This leads me to.

SPEED
Speed is an afterthought to me. I have only used this product on my laptop (I needed a movable scanner, and this and my laptop will easily fit together in my backpacking trips to the library). It’s a four year old lap top as of this writing (summer 2009) which is just a bit slow by this year’s standards. I found myself, feeding the scanner with a new original, pressing scan, , then going to the Window Explorer window to change the default name of the last scan to something descriptive, and finishing just as it was time to feed the scanner again. In other words, if the procedure of scanning and saving was any faster then the machine could be waiting on me; I rarely waited on it (except when using OCR that takes some more seconds per page.

POSITIVES
Out of the box, excellent and rewarding results far exceeding expectations.
The inclusion of a starter OCR product was useful, though finally inadequate for my needs just as both vendors (Epson and ABBYY) knew they could be the low end software just to give the customer a taste.
Intuitive hardware and software controls
Resolution capability beyond anything I could ever find use for
Speed easily meeting my needs.
Size and weight make trips to archives with it and the laptop in my backpack possible and easy.
Primary (Epson) software functions well and quickly providing nearly everything I could expect

NEGATIVES
The menu “mode” names are odd and inappropriate.
Some of the terms on the menus are strange in comparison to what I’m used to in photo editing software.
Not “plug and play,” you have to install the software from the supplied CD.
No hard copy user manual (but I was the only one who ever read them anyway)
No capability to custom name each scan file on the fly (no “save file as” pop up window).

Buy it, you will love it. If it lasts a long time, I may name it.

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418 of 429 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars great home scanner, November 25, 2008
By fatmav See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE) This review is from: EpsonPerfectionV300PhotoColorScanner(Black) (Office Product)
Buyer review from the Vine™ Program () Over the years I have been through some number of scanners both at work and at home. This Epson V300 is the new home scanner for me.

Speed: Back then a high resolution scanner was like 600dpi and obliged a SCSI connection to move that total of info in reasonable total of time. Thankfully, these days USB2 is ubiquitous and comparatively quick, so the bottleneck is really not at the connection nor the scanner. Instead, I found that I’m typically CPU bounded because of all the image processing that happens after the data was transfered to my computer. After all, 4800x9600dpi is many of info to go through. So yes, it can give you a slow scanning experience, but it is not the scanner’s problem at all. I also note this scanner use an LED lighting source, the warmup time is about three seconds. This is much shorter than the older CFL scanners that can take a minute or two to warm up.

Scanning quality: This is top notch, particularly given the price. I have seen results from much costly scanners as well as an high end scanner from HP. At 1200dpi, which is a common setting for my workflow, I do not detect any material differences in the pictures, which is a good sign. If anything, the tiny difference is in the optical performance, most probably caused by the covering on the glass that separates the document and the sensor. In specific, I do see a bit more chromatic aberration. But, this is something that may be corrected in software and I believe it’s present in all scanners.

Software: Having been an HP user for so long, I find the Epson Scan utility to be adequate and I really like it better than HP’s offering. It has all the features that I expect. Note that I didn’t install the other two included softwares “Arcsoft MediaImpression” and “ABBYY good Reader Spring Plus OCR”. The former I dont have interest, the second one is a lite variant of ABBYY’s commercial OCR product. I happen to have another OCR solution at my disposal and so I skipped this up sell offering also. Note that I’m a Windows user and so I can not speak for the Mac side of the story.

Overall, I’m positively impressed with this scanner. If this is your 1st scanner, I do not see anything that can go wrong.

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187 of 192 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars Say goodbye to “Scanner Warming Up”!, December 17, 2008
By Kevin Nicholls “jaded, maturing hipster” (Milford, MI) See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME) This review is from: EpsonPerfectionV300PhotoColorScanner(Black) (Office Product)
Buyer review from the Vine™ Program () Coming from an (admittedly older) Canon LIDE scanner and the scanner in my Canon Pixma MX850 Office All In One Printer, LED scanning is not whiz bang new technology to me. And Truthfully, I was not expecting to put either scanner out to pasture.

But Epson has proven me wrong with the V300.

One of the biggest pains in scanning pictures for me, was waiting for the scanner to warm up, and for the driver to accept that the scanner is warmed up and really let me scan something. With the V300, you tell it to scan, and it just does. I can not stress how surprised I was to find how such a comparatively minor thing made scanning seem like less of a chore.

The quality is excellent, too. Admittedly, my last scanners were intended with basic home use in mind, but, there really is a obvious difference in quality, when I did side by side comparisons at the same resolutions.

Getting the scanner to work with my Mac was not a problem, either. Pop in the disc, run the installer, and connect the scanner. Next thing I knew, Photoshop CS3 was prepared to use it. One thing I really have to say here, is that Epson’s scanner drivers blow Canon’s out of the water, if you ever pay attention to your Mac’s log files. The Epson driver is not constantly spawning messages to the syslog (or just plain breaking) if you use the scanner on a single computer with many users logged in.

The only downside with this (or really any other consumer grade scanner) is that high res scans take a pretty while. Not quite “go to another room and make yourself breakfast” slow, but you surely have time to go get yourself a cup of coffee while you wait for an 8×10″ photo to scan at high res. But, the quality of the scan makes the wait useful.

At this price, and with this kind of speed and quality, you really can not go wrong.

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