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Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M

Collin Keefe — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:30:01 -0500

Paper goes in, PDFs or JPEGs come out.

Conquering stacks of paper in mere seconds, the ScanSnap S500M’s specialty is document scans done easy. You can get a flatbed scanner to do the same job at a fraction of the cost, but you’ll also spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs as that flatbed scanner chugs through your document.

The S500M bears a resemblance to an old-school fax machine. It operates like one, too. To digitize paper, you simply drop your docs in the paper chute. Two CCD image sensors capture text and images. The ScanSnap Manager software then transposes the image data, seamlessly converts it into a PDF file (or a JPEG file, in color mode only), and saves the file to your hard drive.

The scanner’s ease of use is matched only by its efficiency. At 150 dpi, the S500M can scan 20 single-sided pages per minute. That’s nearly 20 percent faster than its predecessor, the ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM (4 out of 5 stars, Feb/06, p53). Thanks to the dual-image sensors, the S500M can almost keep up its pace when faced with two-sided pages. The image sensors simultaneously capture text and images from both sides of a page in a single pass. At maximum resolution, scanning 10 single-sided pages took 5 minutes, while 10 double-sided pages took 8 minutes, 45 seconds.

The S500M automatically detects and omits blank pages from final PDFs and can straighten crooked images without any human intervention. It supports a variety of paper stocks and sizes. And while the paper chute holds up to 50 pages,
we found the S500M prone to paper jams. With a little practice, however, you can time it just right to drop in one page at time for a simple workaround.

The S500M’s photo scans aren’t in the same league as a flatbed scanner’s, but it’s suitable for producing For Position Only (FPO) quality files.

The bottom line. It’s expensive, but the ScanSnap S550M quickly transforms your paper mountains into digital molehills.

COMPANY: Fujitsu
CONTACT: scansnap.fujitsu.com
PRICE: $495
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.8 or later, USB
Scans documents directly to PDF quickly and easily. Faster than its predecessor.
Pricey. Doesn’t handle image scans well.

Perfection V100 Photo and V350 Photo

Rick Oldano — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:54:11 -0600

The V350 (right) has a built-in film feeder. The V100 (left) doesn't.

While you're out and about with your digital camera, snapping photos until the cows come home (or at least until your memory card is full), back at your office, sitting in a dark place, are boxes and boxes of film negatives. Remember film negatives? Those dark amber plastic strips you got when you picked up your pics from the photo processor? Epson's Perfection V100 Photo and Perfection V350 Photo scanners make it possible to digitize your negatives once and for all.

The V100 is for neophytes who want to scan film negatives. The scanner has a film holder that holds one six-frame strip of 35mm film or four 2-by-2-inch mounted slides. The V100 has two light sources that illuminate the image as it's being scanned, one in the lid, and another under the glass scanning bed. The film holder rests on the glass, and the light source located in the scanner's lid shines through the film, while the CCD sensor found under the glass does the scanning. Epson has done well with this design; even first-timers will find it easy to use the film holder to scan negatives.

The V100 has a maximum optical resolution of 3,200 dpi and can handle a reflective target (regular photos, books, magazines, and so on) up to 8.5 by 11.7 inches. The scanner's lid is hinged so that it can expand upward for thick documents or books. The unit sports four one-touch buttons: The Scan button scans and saves the captured image without forcing you to fiddle with scanning software on your Mac. The Copy button scans your document and sends the image to Epson's helpful Copy Utility, which lets you print it out. The Email button scans and attaches the scanned image to an email message in your default email app. The PDF button scans an image or multiple document pages and creates a PDF file containing all of the scanned material.

The major difference between the Perfection V350 Photo and the Perfection V100 Photo is that the V350 has a built-in filmstrip feeder. The feeder is built into the scanner's lid and can accept a strip of 35mm film negatives from two to six frames long. The feeder, however, limits the capacity of the included film holder, which can hold only two 2-by-2-inch mounted 35mm slides or three frames of 35mm film. But if you're drowning in an avalanche of 35mm film negatives, the feeder can save a lot of time. The other major difference is that the V350 Photo offers a higher 4,800 dpi optical resolution.

Both scanners produce image quality that's good for typical photo sizes (from 3 by 5 inches to 8 by 10 inches). If you want to make extreme enlargements, you should opt for the V350 and its 4,800 dpi maximum native resolution. If you're scanning 4-by-6-inch photos, both models take about a minute to scan-about average for scanners in this price range.

The bottom line. The Perfection V100 Photo and Perfection V350 Photo offer two affordable ways to tackle the film conundrum.

Perfection V100 Photo

COMPANY: Epson
CONTACT: www.epson.com
PRICE: $99.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.8 or later, USB
Affordable. Good image quality. Nice one-touch button functions.
No user's guide in box.

Perfection V530 Photo
COMPANY: Epson
CONTACT: www.epson.com
PRICE: $149.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.8 or later, USB
Built-in filmstrip feeder. Good image quality.
Limited film holder capacity. No user's guide in box.

Perfection V750-M Pro

Rick Oldano — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:00:59 -0600

Fill 'er up with flammable fluid.

Designed for the serious amateur or professional photographer with a closet full of film negatives to scan, Epson's Perfection V750-M Pro scanner incorporates an old photo lab technique to repair scratches on a negative that can affect the quality of the final printed image.

Before the digital imaging revolution, traditional photo labs used fluid to fix badly scratched negatives. A film holder suspended the negative in fluid, the fluid filled in the scratches, and when a print was produced, it looked fairly clean. The V750-M Pro adopts this oldfangled technique with its fluid-mount film holder, which works only with black-and-white film. You apply a few drops of fluid to the holder, place the film on top of the fluid, and press down lightly to distribute the fluid underneath the film. Next, you cut a piece of Mylar film (purchased separately) large enough to cover the photographic film, deposit a few drops of fluid on top of the photographic film, and then cover it with the Mylar, again pressing down so the fluid covers the entire surface area. It’s not a difficult procedure, but it definitely makes scanning a bit more laborious.

We used the V750-M Pro's fluid-mount system on scratched, 30-year-old, black-and-white negatives and were impressed and pleased with the results. We had previously scanned these same negatives and cleaned up the scratches in Adobe Photoshop, which took one to two hours for each image. The fluid-mount scans cut down our clean-up time in Photoshop by roughly half. Using the fluid-mount film holder reduced the severity of the scratches and virtually eliminated the dust clinging to the negative. Over the long haul, the fluid-mount holder proves to be well worth the price.

The V750-M Pro fluid-mount system does have some caveats, however. First, you have to buy a separate $165 mounting kit that includes the fluid, Mylar, cleaning kit, and other items. Second, Epson doesn't sell the mounting kit or fluid; you have to buy it from Aztek (www.aztek.com). Third, the mounting fluid is highly flammable; if you order it online, it can only ship via ground. And finally, the fluid is only available in 1-liter bottles; Epson says that since you use only a few drops at a time, a bottle should last years.

For color film, you use Digital Ice, Epson’s digital technology for fixing scratches and dust. It works well, but it sometimes mistakes certain elements of a photo for a scratch or dust.

The V750-M Pro also has a dual-lens system, allowing for two native maximum resolutions: 4,800 dpi over the entire scanning area, and 6,400 dpi over the top half of the area. The higher-resolution area comes in handy when scanning smaller film formats.

The bottom line. Though it can't replace a drum scanner, the V750-M Pro is a more affordable alternative, especially for black-and-white negatives.

COMPANY: Epson
CONTACT: www.epson.com
PRICE: $799.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2 or later, USB or FireWire 400
Fluid-mount system for film works well. Great image quality.
Fluid-mount system requires practice and works on black-and-white film only. Fluid and transparent film not included.

ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM

Roman Loyola — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:58:24 -0600

Looks like a printer. Acts like a scanner.

The euphoniously named ScanSnap fi-5110EOXM can make quick work of converting paper into digital files. Measuring 11.2 by 5.7 by 5.9 inches, ScanSnap doesn't take up a lot of space, and it looks more like an inkjet printer than a scanner. It connects to your Mac via USB - it takes less than 10 minutes to get the scanner up and running - and the bundled software includes ScanSnap Manager and Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard.

It's easy to set the limited options of the ScanSnap Manager software, which controls the quality of your scans and the format of your image files (you're restricted to JPEG or PDF formats). There are multiple image-quality modes (150, 200, 300, and 600 dpi for color; 300, 400, 600, and 1,200 dpi for black-and-white), and you adjust the compression level for each scan.

To scan, you place your documents into the feeder as you would load paper into a printer. Then you press the Scan button, and ScanSnap goes to work - quite quickly, too. At the lowest resolution, ScanSnap raced thorough our documents, taking 38 seconds to scan 10 pages of text, 59 seconds to scan a 28-page double-sided color document with pictures (ScanSnap can scan both sides of a two-sided page at once - nifty, huh?), and 48 seconds to scan 13 color PowerPoint slides. At its highest resolution, ScanSnap took longer, but it was still fast - just over 7 minutes each for 10 pages of text and a 28-page double-sided document, and close to 5 minutes for the PowerPoint slides. But even at the 1,200 dpi, color-image quality was low - but ScanSnap is an office manager, not a photographer's assistant.

ScanSnap bundles no direct-to-file OCR software, but there's an easy workaround: Scan to PDF, open the file in Acrobat, and convert the scanned text to a text file using Acrobat's Recognize Text Using OCR feature.

The bottom line. ScanSnap can quickly make molehills out of mountains of paper documents.

COMPANY: Fujitsu
CONTACT: 212-599-9800, http://scansnap.fujitsu.com
PRICE: $495
REQUIREMENTS: USB-equipped G4, Mac OS 10.2 or later, 128MB RAM, 500MB disk space
Fast. Compact. Easy to use.
Pricey. Limited software controls.

Perfection 4490 Photo

Rick Oldano — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:50:09 -0600

Ready to handle photos, negatives, and slides.

With its secondary light source, film holders for both 35mm and medium-format slides and negatives, and great image quality, the Perfection 4490 Photo scanner can tackle the scanning demands of serious amateurs and many - if not most - professional photographers.

Following the quick-installer guide, we had the 4490 unpacked and running in about 20 minutes. The 4490 comes bundled with Adobe's Photoshop Elements 2 - it's a generation behind today's Elements (version 3), but it will more than suffice if you don't have any image-manipulation software. You also get Epson's Easy Photo Fix for color-correcting your images, Digital ICE for removing dust and scratches, and Abbyy FineReader for OCR (optical character recognition) scanning.

The Perfection 4490 Photo scans at a native 4,800 dpi, and at this resolution our scans were sharp, maintained detail, and had accurate color. The 4490's interpolated resolution is an impressive-sounding 12,800 dpi, but we don't recommend using this resolution often - we weren't pleased with the image quality.

Both the Digital ICE and Easy Photo Fix apps worked well. If you aren't proficient at scanning and manually cleaning up your images, these two apps can help smooth out and speed up the process. Digital ICE is a great and easy way to remove pesky dust streaks and scratches from old family photographs. The color-correcting features of Easy Photo Fix are quite impressive, and in many respects they equal the capabilities of Photoshop Elements. We scanned a 30-year-old, well-faded color photo in Easy Photo Fix, and after using the software to tweak the image, the photo could pass for one taken only yesterday - if it weren't for the Angels Flight pants and feathered hair worn by the people in the picture.

The one thing we would like to have seen is a pop-up dialog to remind you to unlock the secondary-light-source transport. If you forget to unlock it after setup, you'll scratch your head for a few minutes trying to figure out why the 4490 isn't scanning your film. We would have been reminded if we had peeked at the setup guide - but hey, who reads those things in their entirety anyway?

The bottom line. The Epson Perfection 4490 Photo is a quality scanner that has the flexibility a photographer needs.

COMPANY: Epson
CONTACT: 800-463-7766, www.epson.com
PRICE: $249.95
REQUIREMENTS: USB-equipped Mac, G3, Mac OS 10.2 or later, 128MB RAM, 450MB disk space
Small footprint. Great image quality. Solid software bundle.
No hardcopy manual.