Product Reviews

Epson's V700 Photo combines high-quality flatbed scanning with transparency scan quality that's comparable to that of a dedicated film scanner. It's a substantial unit, rising 15cm from the desk and weighing 6.6kg. This is largely down to the use of two separate scanning mechanisms, one under the glass plate for reflective media and a second one built into the lid for transparencies.

The transparency unit accepts any type of film that fits within its 10x8" scan area. Various film and slide holders are included to accommodate up to 24 exposures of 35mm film, 12 slides or two exposures of medium- or large-format film. A strong software bundle includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, ABBYY FineReader 6 for optical character recognition (OCR) and SilverFast SE6, which provides advanced scanning controls, though we didn't find Epson's standard TWAIN driver lacking. This comprises three modes: Full Auto, which automatically recognises document type and chooses suitable settings; Home, with various templates and basic user control; and Professional, which presents the full range of controls.

Scans

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are reasonably fast at six seconds for a preview, 15 seconds for a 300dpi A4 scan and 26 seconds for an A4 scan at 600dpi. Switching to the transparency unit, the lamp takes around a minute to warm up, after which 24 negatives take around 45 seconds to preview and 16 minutes to scan at 2,400dpi. The Digital ICE image restoration adds to scan times but is highly effective at repairing damaged photos, removing creases and tears from prints and dust and scratches from transparencies. A secondary dust removal option is also included. While this was quicker and equally successful, it tended to remove fine detail from images. The Grain Reduction option worked well, although higher settings softened detail in images. Color Restoration was impressive, fixing old slides with heavy colour casts in a single swoop and improving the colour balance of various other problematic images.

At first we weren't convinced of the need for separate scan heads for reflective and transparent media, but the quality of results allayed scepticism. Reflective media was pixel-sharp up to 2,400dpi, and transparencies at up to 4,000dpi - not quite in line with specifications, but fine for most scanning tasks and as good as any scanner we've seen, including dedicated film scanners that cost over £100 more. Colour accuracy was hard to fault, with smooth greyscales. Reds were sometimes under-saturated and matt reflective media a touch too dark, but it wasn't hard to correct.

If you're serious about photography, there's now no need to splash out on separate film and flatbed scanners. The V700 handles both superbly and costs less than separate units of comparable quality.