REVIEW: Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner

The Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner is a new and sleek consumer-oriented model that handles reflective copy (prints) up to A4 size, and transparencies, including those old negatives and slides you have tucked away. It comes with software for Windows and Mac, which takes about 10 minutes to install, then you can take off the safety tape, unlock the scanner, plug in the USB cable and power and off you go.

The Perfection V500 comes with a load of Epson software, some of which might be useful to Windows users but most Mac users will prefer the more familiar iPhoto. For still more image editing power, a second CD containing Photoshop Elements 4 may be a useful addition for those without the more full-featured Photoshop. Even if you don’t want or need image editing software, the V500 uses Digital ICE software to detect and remove dust and scratch marks from colour film and slide scans.

With transparencies in mind, the V500 comes with two holders that fit on the scan platen (the glass surface you put things on to scan when you lift the lid) to fit 35mm film strips and for larger 120-size transparencies.
The V500 captures a theoretical 281.5 trillion colours as it’s a true 48-bit scanner.

Scanning transparencies is all about resolution – even a 35mm slide or negative holds a staggering amount of detail. For a digital device to record this information in enough detail to make a sizeable image, the resolution of the scanner has to be high, an area where the consumer scanners can fall down. The resolution of the V500 is a very useful 6400dpi x 9600dpi.

I’ve always liked the Epson scan software, eschewing the amateur modes (Full Auto and Home) for Professional Mode which gives all the control I want, like exposure control, colour curves, moiré removal for scanning commercially printed documents (images in magazines and books etc) and more.

Full Auto is very basic – I’d recommend Home Mode which is much better and pretty self-explanatory even for novices. Home Mode at least lets you direct the result for web/email or print and includes colour restoration, de-screening (for use against moiré as mentioned above), backlight correction and dust removal.

Additionally, as we become more environmentally aware and, perhaps more directly, worried about power cuts, the V500 is the world’s first CCD scanner to use energy efficient ReadyScan LED technology, which contains no mercury and has lower power consumption than traditional CCD arrays.

Prints scan in less than a minute in most instances, at 300dpi. Nice. But the real test is transparency scanning, in which you often scan one-to-one at the highest optical resolution a scanner will achieve, then change them to 300dpi with re-sampling in Photoshop to get a much bigger (like 25cm wide) image than the little 35mm slide you started with.
Even two years ago you would expect a pretty poor result from a consumer scanner but the V500 handles all tasks very well, holding tone and detail and even registering the film grain of some of the faster film stock I scanned.

The slide and transparency holders are a little fiddly – bear in mind that when you’re mounting transparencies you’re also trying desperately not to damage and fingerprint them – but that’s been the case with every scanner I’ve tested.