Epson Perfection V600 Color Photo, Image, Film, Negative & Document Scanner

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/SLIDESSo 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 V600While 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 SCANNINGI 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 = ProfessionalDocument type = Positive filmImage Type = 48-bitResolution = 2400 dpiCHECK the unsharp mask box to turn it on, set level to LOWCHECK the Color Restoration box to turn it on.Nothing else checked.Click preview, select and flip any upside-down slides with the optionsClick 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.CONSThis 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 DIDFirst 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.WORKFLOWEach 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 ScanSelect "Professional" and "Current Settings"2400dpiCheck color restoration box onCheck unsharp max on / MediumDust spray and put in 4 slides.Click PreviewClick 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 ScannerDust-off SprayerUSB 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 slideThis 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

I bought this for our family for Christmas to digitize hundreds of rolls of film negatives mainly taken on our SLR (pre-digital days). There are many great memories we wanted to preserve: our wedding, our young children, vacations, etc. We debated sending them to a digitizing service, but we figured that would still be a lot of work for us in trying to organize all the photos in proper chronological order...obviously, it would be a lot more expensive too.Overall it has been a great experience and the scanner provides outstanding images that rival our modern digital cameras. The most important thing is to get an efficient workflow going to minimize the amount of time it takes for a large job like ours.We had a few rolls taken on our children's cheap cameras or disposable underwater cameras. The scans of these negatives were significantly lower quality than our SLR photos. So the quality of the photos really affects the results you will get.Digital ICE is really amazing at removing dust/dirt from the negatives. It is a huge time saver over having to edit each photo with GIMP/Photoshop to remove flaws. I saw no artifacts from this process. The software's Dust Removal option did not work well, so I would advise using Digital ICE and leave Dust Removal off. However, using the Digital ICE options more than doubles the scan time, but I find this well worth it.Before starting, do some experiments to find the optimal settings for scanning your negatives. For most of our photos we used: 2400 DPI, Unsharp mask set to Low, Digital ICE on, all other check-mark options off. When saving the photos to JPEG files we used a quality setting of 7 (equivalent to 93 in other image tools such as GIMP).We also bought a second negative tray to make things more efficient. We bought the following, which is identical to the one provided with the scanner from Epson:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WVGFP7HHere is our workflow:1. Insert negatives into the holder. Initially, we followed the directions and put them face down. But we found quite a few rolls had significant curvature that caused the negatives to touch the bottom glass. This creates newton rings that are impossible or take a lot of work to remove via an image processing program like GIMP. We did a lot of research on this and ultimately decided to put the negatives face up in the holder. We do not see any difference in image quality when doing some careful testing.2. Give a few puffs of air to both sides of the negatives to remove dust/dirt. We bought a Giottos AA1900 Rocket Blaster from Amazon, which works well. Then insert negatives on scanner glass and close.3. Hit <preview> on Epson Scan. During this minute, remove the previous negatives that just came out of the scanner and file these away.4. Hit <all> on the preview scan pane to select all images. To undo the fact we put the negatives in upside down: Hit <mirror> button, then <rotate> button twice. Then hit the Digitial ICE button and Unsharp mask to Low. It is unfortunate that the software does not remember these settings.5. Double click on the first preview image and adjust the brightness/color as needed (using the 4th icon). Repeat this for each preview photo. We found that most of our negatives needed between -5 and -25 on the brightness. Some needed color tweaking, mainly adding some blue.6. Hit the thumbnail button to go back to thumbnails. Then hit <Scan>. You need to think how you want to organize the photos if you have thousands of photos you are scanning. We decided on the filename: IMG_YYYY_Rollrr_nnn.jpg where YYYY is the year, rr is the roll number for that year, and nnn is photo on the roll. It is nice the software automatically increments to photo number. We had to edit some filenames later after we found some rolls out of order.7. During the 20-25 minutes it takes to scan the negatives, prepare the next set of negatives in the second negative holder. This is a big time saver.8. Now you can go away form the scanner/computer and do something else. Unfortunately, the software does not indicate with a sound when it is finished the scan. We wasted a lot of time when the prior scan was finished and we were away from the computer. So I wrote a little Python program that would look at the Scanning Progress window and play some music when it was no longer on the screen. This was a huge time saver, but unfortunately most users are not going to have the programming skills to be able to do this. So as soon as we hear the music, we return to the computer. This works great.9. Remove the negatives that have been scanned and go back to step 2.After scanning a few rolls, I then go through each image to see if any have flaws. I found that about 10% need some touch up work with GIMP, mainly to remove dust that Digital ICE could not fix properly. But these were at most 2 or 3 spots per photo. About 5% of photos need some color correction or highlight/shadow optimization in GIMP; it makes sense to try to use the Epson Scan software to get this as good as possible on the previews before scanning to avoid this post-processing work as much as possible.Overall, this is a great scanner and well worth the money and time it takes to revive old memories.