Home > Consumer Reviews > Epson Perfection V350 Photo scanner 4800 X 9600 DPI Auto Film Loader

I think for the money the quality of the scans from this device exceeds all expectations. What a shame that it is the most unreliable, fragile, infuriating piece of kit from Epson I've ever encountered. When using the film strip scanner (the principle reason for buying it) it constantly reports film jams (both real and imaginary), and other spurious problems. When I first got it It took three evenings to get it to do more than one scan without rebooting and it continues to frustrate. By the way I'm not a beginner, I'm a graphic design professional and have been scanning at work daily for well over ten years, I just needed something to digitise forty years worth of snapshot negs at home. I'm staying with the V350 simply because the next step up is about £500. If you can live with its highly strung personality this scanner is remarkable value. If you're inclined to be impatient it will drive you mad.

Wonderful piece of kit, scans film & slides very well indeed, you just need to read instuctions first, though I found it quite user friendly, I had it scanning slides within 30 min after getting it out of the box.
Auto film loader is spot on, a key feature, it does require the film to be undamaged, no kinks or damaged edges and fed in with care.
Sure its a bit on the slow side but the quality of result is very good indeed, software allows for all sorts of repair and enhancement.
It was able to scan repair/restore forty year old film a treat.
A bargain for the casual film/photo scanner who cannot justify the high cost of a dedicated 35mm film scanner.
And of course its a brilliant flat bed scanner when you've finished with film.

I replaced my ailing Epson 1250 (6 years service) with a V350 on the strength of reviews saying its scans are high quality and because the old scanner produced jaggies on slide scans, even at max resolution.

First impressions were not that great - there was nothing to say you should first uninstall your old scanner drivers (I did, luckily) and the V350 install seemed to freeze half way. I was about to kill it but first tried Alt Tab and found a little "Next" window waiting behind the main install window! Sloppy. Then I tried scanning three images at once in full auto (default) mode. It missed one entirely and cropped into the other two - because they were not straight. But it's impossible to get things straight on this scanner because it will not scan up to the edge of the glass! Why didn't they bring the plastic edges over to where it actually starts scanning? Then I tried scanning some slides but it took ages to find out how to do it because the instruction manual is so bad in this area. Eventually I found the locating holes it failed to mention.

Since then things have looked up. I discovered Full Professional mode which puts you back in charge of scans. Plenty of controls and it will even save different settings (eg slides vs photos). Importing scans of transparencies into Photoshop Elements I found the 12800 and 9600dpi resolutions incredibly slow and both would only do one slide at a time before stopping with "out of memory" problems. Luckily 4800dpi scans are very good. They produce 24Megapixel images in Photoshop which are jaggy free and look good when cropped & resized to 5MP or so. The speed is adequate (not fast) and at least you can do other things like browse the net while it's scanning. My old scanner used to keep its progress window on top of everything.

Scanning photos is pretty good. Reasonably fast (eg at 400dpi) and pretty faithful to the originals. When I figure out how to keep them straight (use a plastic ruler as a spacer?) I'll probably feel this scanner merits 4 stars. It's certainly good enough that I'm re-scanning all our remaining transparencies. Fortunately we cut them down from 50+ boxes to just six a while back.

I loaded all of the software offered except Arcsoft Photoimpression but I'm not sure how much of it I'll ever use, as I always scan straight into Photoshop Elements.

So, the price of the V350 is good and I like the quality of the scans but with a bit more thought and care it could have been a lot easier to use.

I bought the V350 primarily because I wanted to scan 40-year old 35mm slides. To say the results were good is an understatement. All of the slides had a strong pink tinge - a film fault (Gevacolour) similar to an over-exposure, and they have been like that since the day they were developed. The V350 comes with colour correction software, and it performed a miracle restoring the original colour to every slide. It was like seeing my past magically come back to life and in faithfully reproduced, crisp and clear colour!
At 1200dpi it took 2 mins to load,scan and save 2 slides as independent images. Now that might seem slow but the scans were 1st class. The slide holder is sturdy unlike some of the competition that use a flimsy strip you have to peel apart.
No doubt there are faster machines and some that can scan more than the 2 slide maximum the V350 offers - but be prepared to pay a lot more! I've not tried scanning 35mm filmstrip yet (hence 4 stars) but so far I have found the V350 easy, intuitive to use and flexible.
Too many people today expect a Ferrari for the cost of a Ford. You get what you pay for and with the V350 it's excellent value for money.

So far, I have been very pleasantly surprised at how good this scanner is for the price. Having read the reviews I was a little nervous about the software, but I installed it on an old computer where I had removed all printer files so I dont know if that helped or not.

I have been using the auto program which is good enough for me. I did try the professional one and set the dpi at 4,800 and I ended up with a 20mb picture which quite frankly didnt look much different on the pc from the same 174k picture I achieved with the auto program.

The one slight disadvantage is the vertical pictures on the slides and I found by putting them in the holder in the correct position, I ended up with wide black bands on either side which could be cropped of course, but it also took the top of the picture off, so the only way round this is to just lay all the slides in the same position and then flip them around after the image has been produced. When played on a dvd player through the tv the vertical ones of course come up quite a bit smaller as opposed to the horizontal ones which fill the whole screen. But this is preferable to having one's head twisted around to look at them as horizontal!!!

It probably isnt fair, that I have knocked off one star because this scanner is only able to do two slides at a time and so can be quite time consuming and naturally the higher the resolution, the longer it takes. I also noticed that I could only scan one slide at a time with the professional software but with the auto, two. As the slides I have are from the sixties, I did notice some dust and a few fibres so a soft brush would probably be a good accessory to use before scanning. It took me best part of the morning to scan about 50 slides but I think as I get used to it, this will improve.

I havent tried scanning anything other than slides at the moment as that was the purpose of buying it. I did however, accidentally scan as a photo in the professional program because I hadnt altered the option to positive and I got a very clear picture of the slide holder and the two transparencies! It apparently does not scan single negatives but will scan 35mm strips of film but I havent tried that as yet.

All in all, fingers crossed that it doesnt pack up on me, I am very pleased with this product. Provided it lasts during the 12 months guarantee, I will have saved alot of money scanning hundreds of slides rather than paying a company to do it.

...11 days later and I am still plugging on in between other jobs. Have completed, years 1965, 66, 67 and 68, only another 40 years worth to go, LOL. It is certainly a very slow process but if it saves hundreds of pounds in a super model or paying a company to do it, then it is worth it I think.

A couple of points, firstly, I have noticed I get an error come up and asks if I want to go into troubleshooting. I think this was because it didnt like me opening photoshop pro after a scan where a couple of slides needed cropping, so as this has happened a couple of times, I will leave any editing until I have finished.

Also someone mentioned earlier about it being flimsy. The actual scanner is quite sturdy but I think he was referring to the little plastic template where you place the two slides. The small notch or hole, is not really deep enough to hold the peg on the underside of the frame securely and so if you are not careful it can move about, would be a little harder perhaps with a man's hand. However, I have got around this, by sticking some masking tape along the edge of it onto the main scanner edge and it is fixed nicely now and doesnt move about.

I have also noticed that it doesnt like anything in it as soon as it switched on, so twice I have got scans of the frame, glass and slides, and have to wait until it has finished, discard them and then hit the scan program icon again and it's fine.