Product Reviews

Epson's Perfection 4180 Photo is designed for home users who take their photography seriously. It scans at an optical resolution of 4,800x9,600dpi and can scan 35mm negatives, slides and medium-format film. A decent holder for 35mm film is included, but we found that the medium-format holder didn't hold film firmly enough to ensure an even scan.

The 4180 is fairly large and comes encased in silver and gunmetal-coloured plastic that looks and feels solid. It connects to your PC using USB Hi-Speed and comes with an impressive software bundle that includes ABBYY Fine Reader 5 Sprint, Bizcard 4 LE and Adobe's excellent Photoshop Elements 2.

Scanning using the

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4180 is impressively fast. An A4 preview takes just under nine seconds, and scanning an A4 document at 300dpi and 24-bit colour was completed in 19.26 seconds. When using the fully automatic scanning mode, an image from positive 35mm film was completed in one minute and three seconds and a 10x15cm photo took 6.28 seconds. These results aren't particularly remarkable, though, as they are similar to those recorded by Epson's £69 Perfection 2480 Photo.

When scanning at high resolution, the reproduced images were impressively sharp and, although some were lacking in contrast, this was easily corrected in Photoshop Elements. With the resolution turned up to 4,800dpi our positive 35mm film image was reproduced sharply, although the colours were slightly under-saturated.

Epson's driver insisted on automatically cropping one of our slides that had dark areas on the top and bottom. Eventually we found the setting to prevent this, but a scanner designed for professionals shouldn't use this feature by default.

This driver problem throws into question the usefulness of the 4180. Only those who want to scan film should spend this much money on a high optical resolution, but for £200 you should not expect to be limited by a problem of this nature.