Epson V500 Photo Scanner with Feeder Review
There are many scanners on the market, but not all of them are meant for scanning photos. Of the photo scanner with feeders available, it is hard to beat the combination of price and value offered by the Epson V500 photo scanner with document feeder.
This flatbed scanner has a list price of about $250 without the feeder, and about $350 with the feeder. If you will mostly be scanning film rather than prints you can save money by not getting the optional feeder, but if you will be scanning prints or other documents it’s worth the extra cost to get the convenience and speed of a feeder. There are many cheaper scanners, but for high quality photos you need to be willing to pay a little more. For this price you get a large number of impressive features, such as 6400 ppi resolution, which is not really needed for prints but means you can get a quality scan of a 35mm slide. Other important features are the sophisticated Photoshop Elements software that comes with the scanner, the LED light that eliminates the need to wait for the scanner to warm up, and Digital ICE which does a great job of removing scratches and dust from scans of slides or negatives. The features all work together well too.
The quality of the scans is very good for a scanner costing under $500. The speed of the scans is slower than I would like, especially when scanning slides using the Digital ICE, but you’re not going to find a scanner that’s much faster without paying a lot more. You can scan 4 35mm slides at once, or 2 strips of 6 35mm negatives, or one medium format slide or negative. Despite the slow speeds, it is with film scanning that this scanner really shines.
The main drawback of this photo scanner with feeder is the fact that you have to remove the film scanner cover whenever you want to use the feeder. This makes this scanner less attractive than others for scanning documents like pages of text. On the other hand, the scanner includes software that does a good job of recognizing text, so you can convert printed pages into a format like a pdf document that allows for editing.
A good alternative for a photo scanner with feeder is the HP Scanjet 5530, with its built-in feeder that lets you scan 24 prints at a time. However it can only scan small photos this way. A photo scanner feeder also has the disadvantage that you can fairly easily damage the originals, so keep that in mind.