Features:

  • Create extraordinary enlargements from film — 6400 x 9600 dpi for enlargements up to 17" x 22"
  • Scan slides, negatives and medium-format panoramic film — built-in Transparency Unit. Maximum resolution is 12,800 x 12,800 dpi
  • Remove the appearance of tears and creases from damaged photos — DIGITAL ICE for Prints. Effective Pixels: 54,400 x 74,880 (6400 dpi)
  • Remove the appearance of dust and scratches from film — DIGITAL ICE for Film. Temperature: 50° to 95° F (10° to 35° C)
  • Minimum System Requirements:Windows 8, 8.1,Windows 7,Windows Vista,Windows,Windows XP Professional x64 Edition,Mac OS X 10.6.x, 10.7.x, 10.8.x, 10.10.x,Optical drive required for some third party applications
  • NOTE: Check Installation Manual on Technical Specification before use
One of the best puchases I've ever made here and I've made hundreds of purchases!

I LOVE this scanner. I discovered a box of slides from the 70s that I'd never printed. They included images of two family members who died in their early 20s and so not a lot of photos of these 2 people exist. I was thrilled at the prospect of being able to surprise my family with photos from these slides for Christmas. I had heard that one of the big box membership stores whose name starts with a "C" ;-) Does an amazing job with photo processing so I decided to trust them with my slides. I no longer had a film or slide scanner. I got them back and I was crushed. They were total garbage. Totally unusable. I tried to edit them a little more but nothing. Even though I was just a kid, I was a decent photographer and it seemed unlikely to me that every slide could be so bad. I decided I wanted to scan the slides myself and see the outcome. I purchased a cheap firm scanner that had decent enough reviews but that didn't work out so I did more research and decided on this one. I was amazed at how much better the scans were. I will share one of about 50 examples. They may not be the best pictures but they went from unusable to usable. The other day I scanned some super old, square negatives and I was blown away at the beautiful quality of these old black and white images. I'm a family historian. Over the years, I have scanned more than 10,000 negatives, slides and photos. I wish I could re-scan everything after seeing how beautiful this Epson works. My other scans over the years were also done with Epson scanners and they are good but I bet with this scanner, they would be even better. This scanner is a fantastic deal and worth more than they sell it for. I've been on Amazon for years and this is one of my favorite purchases.

Beautiful for huge scanning jobs

I loved this machine! After both my parents had passed, I inherited literally thousands of slides and pictures. For a couple of years I kept putting off the onerous task of scanning all of these slides and pictures. I finally bought this unit based on the high Amazon reviews, and I have no regrets. It does take a little bit of time for it to scan, but the nicest part about it is, for pictures, you can just slap 4 pictures any place on the scanner bed and tell it to scan and 95% of the time it would automatically determine the individual pictures and give me 4 images that did not require any editing that I could immediately save and go on to the next batch. For slides, it was a little bit more work, but I could pretty much put 3 slides in the holder and place it down on the bed, and again, 3 images ready to save. Very few hassles. I was particularly impressed with the slides because they were in awful shape, many were over 50 years old and covered with dust, but the slides came out surprisingly bright and clear. This thing saved me a lot of time and hassle; I highly recommend it. Edit: I've had this machine over a year and a half now. At this point I have scanned around 4000 pictures, slides, and negatives. I just used this scanner a few days ago and it works as good as the day I bought it.. So I can also attest to the fact that this machine is durable.

SLIDE SCANNING SETTINGS EASY USE TIPS

11th Day Update: all 5400 slide transparencies (35mm mounted slides) have been scanned (at 2400dpi) and burned to DVDs. That was with only selective use of Color Restoration, which doesn't add anytime to the scan. We would look at each set of 4 preview images and click and highlight the ones we wanted to color restore (click on the slide, do NOT click on the checkbox...leave the checkbox on each preview CHECKED ON...that's what lets the scanner know you want to scan all 4 slides that you just previewed). Super huge 5,400 slide project DONE for $199 + blank DVDs and a blank usb thumbdrive for backup. We also sprang for an external hard drive and docking station for a super backup. Not bad and we still have a great scanner. Much cheaper than paying a service to do it. Less than 2 weeks worth of work! Background: BFA in Art with concentration in Darkroom Photography; Own my own darkroom for 25 years; Decade as an Imaging Specialist/Scanner Operator (you can skip the next few paragraphs and get to the settings which worked well for us while scanning a bunch of old slides). I was a digital imaging specialist for 10 years at Thomson Learning/Gale Research. Every day for a decade, 8 hours a day I used PhotoShop 3.0+, flatbed scanners, image setters and even a Nikon Coolscan slide scanner with an automatic slide-feeder. As I recall the slide feeder could hold about 40 mounted slides and took about 8 minutes per slide to scan. It would jam once or twice per day. I would use the digitized images in textbooks, dictionaries and online resources/databases we published and charged universities and public libraries for. Meaning: I was in a professional publishing environment. One of my degrees is in Fine Arts with a concentration in dark room photography. I still have (but don't use anymore) an actual photographic darkroom. I've personally hand-developed thousands of rolls of transparency (slide) film. CLEANING OLD FILM/SLIDES So first to correct some erroneous information in a previous review: You CAN wash old film and slides in water. How do you think we washed all the developer/stop bath/fixer off the film once we were done developing it? We used WATER!!! And not fancy distilled water, just regular tap water. Then we hung the film strips from clips in the ceiling until they drip-dried, once dried we would take scissors and cut the entire roll down to manageable strips (or we cut the transparency film down to each frame and popped them into slide holders). Rubbing alcohol will leave streaks and dry spots. A wetting agent could be added to the final rinse water (two drops of rinse agent to a gallon of tap water). That would TOTALLY eliminate dry spots. Of course distilled water could be used NOW since you probably don't have a photo-store near you to buy wetting solution. Distilled water is 99 cents a gallon at the store by me. Guess what the final rinse was when we developed paper prints (color and black and white)...you guessed it! Plain old tap water!!! If you have a paper photography that was made in the 1950s or later you can POSSIBLY remove the stains by soaking it in water! Basically, as long as it's not some glass negative tin-type silver salt thing from the Civil War Era water won't hurt anything! Water makes film and paper VERY SOFT and EASILY SCRATCHED until it dries again. However, as long is your film is in reasonable shape the best bet is to just use an air duster can to blow off the dust. Also blow off the dust from this scanner every once in a while too. RATIONALE FOR PURCHASING THE EPSON V600 While I still have a Umax Powerlook III which was probably around $1700 new, it only does one scan at a time. I wanted to set up a new, easy scan station for my father to scan his old slides: 54 slide projector carousels (round thingies) filled with a maximum 100 slides each. Using this scanner at 2400dpi and saving as JPG at 1 compression (no/least compression) at 48-bit color results in files that are a little over 4MB each closed and abou 10MB open. This scanner can go up to a whopping 128,000dpi but that's overkill for our current purposes: see our old photos and occasionally sending one off to an online printing service for 16x20" print. SETTINGS FOR SLIDE SCANNING I installed the CD software, then plugged in the machine, and finally I turned it on with the ON/OFF button HIDDEN on the right side of the machine. The online manual and the manual on the CD say to use the box with a diagonal arrow to turn it on but that's WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! Contrary to what the instructions say there IS an on/off button. The quick start guide included is correct in this respect. So, for decent slide scans here is a nice setting list: Mode = Professional Document type = Positive film Image Type = 48-bit Resolution = 2400 dpi CHECK the unsharp mask box to turn it on, set level to LOW CHECK the Color Restoration box to turn it on. Nothing else checked. Click preview, select and flip any upside-down slides with the options Click Scan and sit back and wait while all 4 slides are scanned (a little under 4 minutes to scan and auto-name and auto-save). ACTUAL PROJECT: Each slide takes 1 minute to scan, auto-name and auto-save. 54 boxes of slides x 100 slides each = 5400 slides. That's 5400 minutes, which equals 90 hours. That's about two-and-a-half-weeks worth of work at my old jo, working 8 hour days. Totally doable!!!! Each scan closed on disc is less than 5MB, so we'll round up to 5MB. 5,400 x 5MB = 27,000MB, which is 27GB. WOW! 27GB will totally fit on a cheap 64GB thumb drive! It will also fit on about 7 DVD-R discs. A spindle of 100 DVD-Rs is like $20, lol! So: get this; get a can of spray duster; some distilled water if your originals are too gross; a 64GB thumb drive and some DVD-R + blank discs. WHY THIS? Some other "scanners" are cheaper and claim to scan in a single second. They are cheap webcams stuck in a cheap plastic box that take a crappy photograph of you slide. You would get better results taping your slides/negatives to a window and snapping a picture of them with your cellphone!!!! Seriously awful quality. Plus, this Epson also scans paper photographic prints because it's a flatbed. Yes, at about 1 minute per slide it's a little slower (at 2400dpi) but you can save a little time and scan at 1200dpi, or even go down to 100dpi, lol. Depends what you're using them for. Online/facebook then 100-300dpi is fine. Using your photograph to print a HUGE poster: select 128,000dpi and knock their socks off. Plus everything in between. Basically it's $50-$100 for something that's almost guaranteed to disappoint; or $200 for this thing which is awesome. A minute per slide is a lot slower than 1 second per slide. I'd rather spend two weeks getting 5,400 great scans then spend 5 hours getting crappy scans that look terrible and I'll end up deleting. CONS This thing is huge (because it can scan actual sheets of paper too). It's heavy (really heavy and good quality). It has a weird spring on the top: it tries to slam upward when opening and slam downward when closing: BE CAREFUL! On/Off button is not mentioned in two of three manuals. It's on the right side, near bottom, lol. WHAT DIDN'T WORK WELL (FOR US) AND WHAT DID First off, use the professional mode for slides. The automatic easy mode has drawbacks: it only allows 1200dpi scans at the highest setting; even though it's only 1200dpi it seems to take longer than the professional mode at 2400dpi; even though in the manual it says you can skip the preview...it actually does one preview at a time and shows that to you while it scans, which means the preview portion takes FOUR times as long. Also, when you select the color restoration option: the little preview is color restored, but the scan isn't! It's a weird flaw in the software. So: it takes 2x-4x as long and doesn't actually apply color restoration to the scan that is autosaved to your computer. Another problem is that the unsharp mask is NOT an option in the automatic mode! Thus: if you want to scan, color restore and sharpen you have to use the professional mode (and re-check the color restoration box after selection "all" 4 previews with the blue frame highlighting them AFTER EVERY PREVIEW!!!!). Use the professional mode. 48-bit color is noticeably better than 24-bit. Not just nit-picking, it's easily noticed. 24-bit results in flat blocks of color like 1990s over-compressed JPGS, lol. Make sure to use the 48-bit option. On principle I NEVER enable ICE/dust correction because it does a couple things: slows down the scanning/saving process; and it also can do weird things to some photos. I've found it will do well on a bunch of photos, but then do weird things to the glint in peoples' eyes in portraits and makes then look crazy. We're happier with the sprayduster can. I fiddled a little with the grain removal setting, but it just kind of blurred my test slides. Yep: if you blur a photo it's hard to see the grain. I leave the grain removal OFF. You can always blur your scans later if you wanted to. Red EYE reduction: I suppose if you have like 500 slides of people with red eye (reflection of on-camera flash unit's light) then MAYBE you could use this, but I leave it off because I have no idea what it might randomly decide to do to normal portraits or even photos with no people in them. Why chance it? Unsharp mask: you can always sharpen later; but if something is oversharpened it's harder to fix. Sharpening bumps up the color value between two areas of abutting colors (heavier outlines). The sharpening feature IS really nice, so I set it to the "LOW" setting. A good safe bet. Color restoration: WOW! Professionally I would never use this in the past, but this just works great with our Kodak EktaChrome and KodaChrome slides from the 1970s-1990s. I mean the benefit of having this checkbox CHECKED ON is amazing! Something that might take me 10 minutes to get in PhotoShop is just instant. It does wonders even on slides I thought were totally fine. USE IT! There are other settings were you want to: UNcheck the write over files with the same name (why would you want to overwrite your previous scans? An accident waiting to happen). I think it defaults to name by sequential number (1, 2, 3...). I changed the default name from "Img" to "Slide" So they come out "Slide001" "Slide002" and on and on. File type: I selected JPG with no compression (1 out of 100). You could also select TIFF. Honestly, the JPG is nice. When I was a professional (paid) scanner I would save as TIFF. It was lossless (doesn't throw out color information). JPEG has come a long way, and if you set it at no/low compression you won't have problems. TIFFs are still a tad bigger, but if you're scanning once and then throwing away your slides then scan huge and save as TIFF for that once in a lifetime chance of archiving. Honestly, the JPEG is totally fine: at a 1 setting you don't see any jpeg blocky digital artifacts-even when zoomed in. JPEGS also (still) seem to play better when most stuff online/social/tv set/BluRay player/etc. It really doesn't matter too much TIFF vs JPG (as long as you set the JPG to 1 No compression). UNFORTUNATELY it defaults to some default compression setting closer to 100 which WILL LOOK AWFUL, lol. Set it to 1 and then forget it. You're pics will look great. Still worried? Then set it to save as TIFF files and you'll just have to burn a few more DVDs on a large project--no biggie, DVDs are cheap these days. Back in my publishing days it was always: TIFF = Files sent to book printers and files sent to archive CDs ; JPGS for online databases and educational CD-ROMS. It used to REALLY matter which you chose when, but now not so much because you can basically turn off the JPG's compression. Then it basically acts like a TIFF, but still works easily online/TV set viewing/etc. In fact, setting the bit-rate on this scanner down to only 24-bit results in blocks of flat color-just like over-compressed jpgs looked like in the 1990s! That's why I said to use 48-bit. Somewhere in the advanced settings option when you first open Epson Scan you can also uncheck the "include color profiles" box. Unless you're sending your files to a professional printing press that needs specific color profiles THIS JUST BLOATS THE SIZE OF EACH OF YOUR SCANS! I don't care about LAB COLOR vs CMYK vs Srgb ICC profiles and when I was a professional our printers (and by printers I mean the humans who ran huge color printing presses that are about 40' long) would set their prepress to strip out/ignore any color profiles accidentally left attached to image files we sent them...because THEY wanted to control the color, not some random file that nobody on our end looked at or modified or fixed or cared about. UNLESS YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER SENDING SCANS TO A COLOR PRINT PUBLICATION THAT REQUIRES YOU TO SEND ALONG COLOR PROFILES uncheck the box and save space on your computer. Even if you sent a scan to go on the cover of National Geographic I have a feeling they'd override your profile settings when they went to print the magazine. For slides use a light table to flop them down on and arrange them. Also a lamp is good for helping to see which is the shiny side and which is the dull emulsion side with raised lines on it. Emulsion side goes facing the ceiling. If you don't have a lightbox just stick a fluorescent lamp bulb under a clear tuppeware container or something to make one. I take four slides out, have my thumb and index finger hold them by the edges with space in between and that allows me to dustspray between all four at the same time. Fast and easy! Take time to arrange your desk and work area and you can shave DAYS off your project completion time. WORKFLOW Each box of 100 slides gets a new folder on the desktop. It is named with whatever is on the spine of the box of old slides. Turn on compute and scanner. Click on Epson Scan Select "Professional" and "Current Settings" 2400dpi Check color restoration box on Check unsharp max on / Medium Dust spray and put in 4 slides. Click Preview Click on any of the 4 previews (NOT the little checkboxes) and they will be highlighted with a blue frame. Use the "E" rotate button to rotate any highlighted previews. ****VERY IMPORTANT STEP RIGHT HERE: Click the "ALL" button the highlight all four previews with blue frames and then click "RESTORE COLOR CHECKBOX TO ON"/ (The color restoration feature shuts itself off after every preview, and if you turn it back on it only applies to the previews with blue frames around them!). This is for "pros" who only color restore 1 out of every 4 slides or whatever. Click "Scan". Change 4 slides. Repeat a 193 times...once you get 4GB worth then save to DVDs, drag and copy to thumbdrive and drag and copy to external hd. Delete scans off computer. Repeat 7 more times. Pop the cork on some champagne...you're done! Actually, you'll probably want to be drinking throughout the entire project because scanning is a dull, dull process. That's why I became a librarian. Yes, being a librarian is way more exciting than being a scanner operator. LOL! Save to DVDs. Save to USB Thumb drive. Save to an external hard drive (1 Terabyte for $49) using an external hard drive plug-n-play docking station ($20). Store the slides in a cool, dark place. Put a couple thumb drives in different spots. Put DVD copies in different places. Have yet another thumbdrive to plug into our TV to view the slides! Many BluRay players also accept USB thumb drives (or just pop the DVDs you burned into it and view photos). 3 Different archive media (USB Thumbdrive, DVD-R +, External Hard Drive)...plus the copies on the desktop computer this scanner is plugged into. SHINY SIDE GOES UP for slides (dull emulsion side down). For a little more money, and a bit more time you'll have USEABLE FANTASTIC scans. My father and I both researched this slide project. He is a film/darkroom photographer how was an automotive engineer and I was a digital imaging specialist from 1997 -2007 and am now a librarian. It took him a couple days and he favored the Epson v850 for around $1000. I researched for 15 minutes and actually ordered this V600 (for around $200). LOL. It just makes sense. Go look at the photos people post as examples in the reviews for the Wolverine and Jumble units: I can't even tell what some of the pictures are of! Let alone gauge their quality of digitization. If you've got the time and money for this machine you won't be disappointed with the results. Computer (we have a 2/3 year old Dell with i5 core processor and Windows 10, regular non-solid state hard drive) This Scanner Dust-off Sprayer USB Thumbdrive (archive 1) Blank DVDs (archive 2 or more if you burn multiple copies to send to various relatives) External HD (archive 3) Time: 1 minute per slide This thing is heavier than my 25 year old Umax PowerLook III scanner which was used in by my at my job in a multi-million dollar publishing empire. They of course laid-off everyone and sent the work to China/India. They DID sell me my computer and the Umax cheap though! I don't know who got to take home the Nikon CoolScan slide scanner (w/auto-feeder), LOL! If you want a simple solution with GREAT quality and TONS of user changeable settings (but also simple settings too) then GET THIS!!!! Do you have only a month to scan 50,000 slides? Well, then contract a vendor to do them for 60 cents per slide and then sell you an external hard drive with your scans on it...plus shipping...plus expedited service...plus insurance which will give you a few dollars if the shipper looses all your slides so instead of your photos you'll have like $300 and the horror of loosing priceless, irreplaceable pictures. By the way: for my 5,400 slides it would cost at least $3,240 to have them scanned (plus shipping, plus hard drive they return the scans on, etc.). For that much money I could: buy this Epson v600 and pay friend, young relative, random weirdo off CraigsList,college student, neighbor $3000 to do the actual scanning for me! If anything I gave you: a template to plan your project/setup/costs & some easy start-up settings to get great slide scans. I hope this helps. By the way, this thing comes in a HUGE box. Everyone thought I bought a new TV. UPDATE: It's the second day of ownership, and even with our time spent testing settings, setting up a light box, unpacking and dusting off 54 boxes of 100-slide carousel wheels we managed to scan 2 entire boxes out of the 54! Not bad at all! It's going to snow tomorrow, so that'll mean we'll probably get another 2 boxes done. So, casually in about a month our huge archive will be completely scanned. We already popped some of the scans onto a USB and plugged it into a BluRay player: SO COOL SEEING OUR OLD PHOTOS!!! Don't waste anymore time shopping for the cheaper scanners: THIS IS THE ONE YOU WANT! The ONLY THING THAT SUCKS ABOUT IT IS: after every 4 slide batch is previewed the "Color Restoration" box UNchecks itself. So you have to select all four previews and ONLY THEN click to check the color restoration box, and then scan. However that takes about 2 seconds and is a LOT faster than going into PhotoShop and trying to color correct them. I can spend 5-15 minutes trying to color correct an RGB color image, and even longer for a CMYK image for print (textbook, magazine, book cover, etc.). After you do a few dozen you won't even have to think: your hand will just click ALL and Color Correct and SCAN. Muscle memory. The other thing that sucked was the "hidden" power button that was misidentified in two of the three manuals (online, on CD, printed startup guide). Good luck, have fun, spend a day or two scanning and rescanning a few documents to get the perfect settings and physical workflow that works for you! -Mike from Detroit

Excellent scanner for use in labs

In our labs we frequently have to scan various items such as blot membranes or even "wet" polyacrylamide gels. Our old Epson scanner stopped working after at least 2 years of "labuse" but since I am very fond of the Epson scanner software I decided to go with another Epson model. The V600 seemed like a very good choice. The scanners were ordered and arrived two days later in perfect condition (as expected). The installation process and setup are not exciting but also not discouragingly difficult. I recommend to download the drivers and utilities directly from Epson to save the step of having to update soon after installation (http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=139863&infoType=Downloads). When setting up the device make sure to remove all of the packaging and blue tape. Almost more importantly there is a locking mechanism on the rear that needs to be unlocked (see picture); it is used to secure the moving parts during transport I assume. Since nobody really reads manuals anymore I thought it would be worth pointing out since I've not owned a scanner with such a lock before. The beauty of the scanner dialog is that all settings can be saved for different uses. Even the technologically inept have not complained and achieved great results.

Great scanners, great software

Don't get too worked up by the negative reviews calling the Epson Scan software "junk." It isn't. I read enough of the other reviews to convince me to download a copy of Vuescan and try it out right away. True, Vuescan has a lot of film profiles that should be more accurate than the limited number Epson uses, but the trouble with Vuescan and this V600 scanner--in my experience--is that the frames for batch scanning a group of negatives were not accurate, and it was more than a little confusing, if not impossible, to change the frames around. This feature of Vuescan is very confusing your first couple of times around, and I lost patience and shut the program down. Then, thinking I'd better try the Epson software before considering returning the scanner, I opened Epson Scan. I went straight to "Professional" mode, checked out all the parameters they allow adjustment to, selected what I wanted, and clicked "Preview." This is scanning two strips of negatives, mind you. When the preview came up, it had all twelve frames boxed in their own boxes, all basically color-corrected and ready for action. You select a check-box to pick which frames you want to scan, and click on each separate frame to diddle with it--like rotate it to the proper orientation, or change the exposure, whatever. Then just hit "Scan" and walk away. When it finishes you have all your selected scans in your "My Pictures" folder or wherever you want them, named whatever you want with "001", "002" and so-on appended to the name. It is easy as pie, and the quality is on par with any scanner I've used so far. Speed? For a 2400 dpi neg scan much less than a minute per scan. Now some caveats. I'm not running Digital ICE, not doing any kind of sharpening, nothing. All I want is a raw scan; all the fiddling you want to do is better done afterwards in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, it does a much better job. If your negatives need all kinds of cleaning, or if they're all scratched up and require a lot of correcting in the scan, you screwed up. Take care of your negs and slides, keep them clean, and you won't have problems scanning them. You can clean them with a quick wipe with a lint-free cloth with a little rubber cement thinner on it--just don't use anything water-based on negs and slides. Secondly, just for grins I loaded a magazine page into the scanner and tried out the OCR software, ABBYY. They claim that it can scan and convert printed text into type. If you've had any experience with OCR software, you probably take that claim with a large grain of salt, like I did. But one quick scan--greyscale, 400 dpi--and the page was up on the screen. Pull it into Microsoft Word and it was 100 percent accurate, every word spelled correctly, even the closest font was selected for the text. An incredible job, in my opinion. What's my qualifications? I've been working with images my whole professional life. 40 years of photography or more, working with digital images since they first came out. I've owned a dozen different flatbed scanners and a couple of film scanners. You might be able to get better results from a more expensive scanner, but for the money this Epson V600 is tough to beat. Highly recommended. And give the included software a chance, you'll probably like it just fine.

Perfect for film enthusiasts

This is a must for any film photo hobbiest. Does a great job, image quality is great and it's pretty simple to use. I used a sub-par model for a long time, and now I'm going back and rescanning older negs. With as much as I love this machine, there are some drawbacks you should be aware of before buying this model: The negative holder is not that great, especially for home developers. My negatives tend to curl a bit, and the holder does not factor that in, so it takes a bit of finagling before they sit right. And even then, there is some light leakage, which sometimes leaves bright lines on the tops and bottoms of the image (see the example I uploaded). I would recommend making your own holder out of heavy-duty black card stock. If you look around online, you can find some instructions on how to do this. Don't set it to scan at a ridiculous DPI. 3000 dpi should be more than enough. This is a good resource: [...] I use an older MacBook Pro to download the scans, so I'm not sure if that's the issue, but scanning 10 images takes quite awhile. Patience is the key. But is this worth it? Very much so. There are some other machines out there that are higher quality, but this is perfect for the price point. I only wish I bought it sooner.

Best Scanner I've seen

If you are looking for an all in one negative/slide/photo scanner look no further. This thing is the bomb! I got rid of all my darkroom equipment years ago along with all my film cameras, but still had a lot of 6x6 and 35mm negatives and Kodachrome slides. I have been converting all these to digital files. I am enjoying images I haven't seen literally in decades! It also handles prints of any size up to 8x10. There is a brief learning curve and you need to experiment with all the settings and how to use the included holders. Also, when working with negatives and slides, just like you were working in darkroom, dust is a real PITA at these levels of enlargement. Compressed air and a soft brush are helpful. You get a copy of Photoshop with your purchase too. Only criticism is the "ICE" feature is only useful in certain situations and actually causes distortion and other problems in others. Picture is actual example of V600 scanned 6x6 negative, cropped, corrected and retouched with PS.

Better than I expected. As slow as advertised. But delivers great results for the owner of racks and racks of old family slides.

This is a very early review and I would like to reserve my right to change it if disappointed later. I have only used the v600 for one day and it took me the better part of the day to copy (and process in Lightroom) sixteen of the many hundreds of slides that I have to pick from. While that sounds like an over whelming task, it has changed my approach to working with my family archives. Rather than simply copy them forward to digital in their original condition, I am being handed an opportunity to improve them. These were all taken at a time when post-processing was not open to you unless you owned an expensive darkroom. So be aware that the v600 will not instantly copy your thousands of slides. But, with the right mindset you can enjoy the experience of enhancing those photographic captures that you have kept and treasured, but seldom viewed. My workflow is as follows: 1. Copy four slides (the scanner's capacity) at 400 dpi. 2. Import them into Lightroom. 3. Enhance in Lightroom. 4. While in LR, as the last enhancement, edit the photo in a separate software, Noiseless CK. 5. Publish from LR to Flickr, my cloud archive. While the process takes time, it is enjoyable and rewarding to see the old memories once again before you in Kodak Carousel brightness and color -- and better. A couple of examples are attached to this review. Keep in mind, I am an amateur photographer and family archivist. I doubt this machine is up to professional application either in terms of endurance or image quality. But at less than $200, it is perfect for my needs. Nits I would pick: Not much in the way of instruction. You get one small poster but it is enough if you are somewhat experienced with packing electronic gadgets. It is, in fact, quite easy to use once you get it rolling. Added to review Oct 17, 2016: I am adding two copies of an old slide. One was taken with a macro lens by my 35mm dslr. The other was scanned by the v600 scanner. You will see that the scanner and ICE software cleansed the old slide of its mildew without any chemicals. The difference is pretty amazing.

Needed it to scan old slides with Digital ICE...

I had a bunch of 25-year-old slides from my Army days on Johnston Island I wanted to convert to digital. I contemplated sending them off to a scanning service but decided to give this scanner a try first and I'm glad I did. I've attached a picture looking out at the end of the island over our ball field. The second picture was scanned with Digital ICE and you can see how it removed all the dust and imperfections that were left on the slide even though I cleaned it using canned air. I would buy it again.

... finally settled on this one and I am very pleased with my choice

I have reviewed a lot of different scanners and finally settled on this one and I am very pleased with my choice. I purchased it to scan about 2K 35MM Slides. It takes a little trial and error to get it right but you can get great results. There is a 5 star review (March 11 2017) that really gives an in depth guide that really helped me. It is well worth the read. It is very lengthy but the guy knows what he is talking about. I also went to the Epson Website to read a detailed manual. I have not spent much time at all with scanning photos but what I did do turned out well. I have found that on old slides (1950's), you need to use the color restoration and Digital ICE. It takes longer (4 min per slide) but the results are much better. On newer slides from the 70's - 90's, I did not need the color restoration or the Digital ICE. A simple scan and I got good results and it only takes a minute per scan. I tried several different settings and found an all round setting that worked well on most all slides. If using a mac, you may have to download an updated driver from Epson to prevent it from pausing between scans. The following are the settings I used: 35 MM Slides Professional Mode Document Type - Film Film Type - Positive Film 48 Bit Color 2400 dpi Check Unsharp Mask and set to Medium Color Restoration (all old slides) Digital ICE (for old slides only) Set compression to 1 Select Preview Click All Check Color Restoration Check Digital ICE (id needed) Click Scan I hopes this review helps others make up their mind.

Full Reviews