Epson Expression 1680 review

When you're forking out £649 for a serious scanner, you won't be overly concerned with gimmicks like interchangeable translucent handles. This is why the Epson Expression 1680 has an identical design to the Expression 1600 (see Reviews, issue 68, p168), with just one button and a simple chassis.

There's nothing modest about the 1680's size, so make sure you have enough space to accommodate it. Setting up is easy and there are connectors for both SCSI and USB interfaces, and optional IEEE-1394. It can also be shared over a network via the host PC.

The supplied Epson TWAIN Pro software isn't pretty, but it's expertly thought through in its simplicity. All the submenus are explanatory, from the resolution selector to simple numeric adjustments for gamma, shadow and highlight. The destination selector also features prepress settings for 175, 150, 133, 120lpi (lines per inch), without over-complicating matters, and the Densitometer gives you real-time RGB and luminosity values of any area of the preview.

As with the Epson Perfection 1240U and 1640SU Photo (see Labs, issue 82, p110), the 1680 offered respectable performance in our scientific tests, but nothing out of the ordinary. With its 1,600ppi optical resolution, it returned a great sharpness result of 1.1MTF, but this is still way behind the 1.27 recorded from the cheaper HP ScanJet 7400C (see Labs, issue 82, p110). Likewise, the signal-to-noise ratio of 109.74 is a good result, but put to shame by cheaper competition.

The most surprising results came from the colour accuracy test, which showed error rates small enough to be invisible on every colour except blue. Both the blue and cyan patches produced error rates above 20 and, while the average of 7.87 isn't bad, it's only levelled out by the exceptional results from the other patches. The 1240U had a similar problem with blues, but only with error rates of 12.96 and 14.69. Error rates above 20 are unacceptable in a high-end scanner.

Where the Expression 1680 excelled was in our real-world photo tests, where even at 300ppi the finest details and colours were captured smoothly and accurately. It even scans quickly, taking just seven seconds to preview, one minute, 36 seconds to scan a 600ppi 8 x 10in photo, and 13 minutes, 21 seconds for the same photo at 1,600ppi.

The Expression 1680 has some great specifications, and this is what's been improved over the 1600. We've progressed from 36-bit colour and 12-bit greyscale scanning to 48-bit and 16-bit respectively, and the optical density rating has improved from 3.3D to 3.6D. This is redundant unless you're scanning transparencies though, and you'll need an extra £229 for the transparency adaptor - £11 more than the Perfection 1640SU Photo in its entirety.

There's no doubting that the Expression 1680 is good, but it's uncompetitive when outperformed by scanners at a third of the price. The TWAIN software and performance are what you need for prepress professional scanning, and you get Adobe Photoshop 5 LE too, but you can get similar performance for a lot less money elsewhere.

Author: Ben Hardwidge