Home > Consumer Reviews > Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner (6400dpi, 3.4 Opt Density, USB 2.0)

This is a fabulous product at a fabulous price. I wanted to scan old family photos, some dating back to the early 1900s that were not in good shape. The scanner is not only easy to use but the results are excellent. There are slide cases, too, for scanning slides, which I haven't tried yet. I scan from Photoshop. Just go into Photoshop and select File - Import - Epson V500 and it's done, or you can simply press the scan button on the front of the machine. Scanners I have used in the past have been confusing and complicated - not this one. The machine wants to scan at 100%, but you can easily adjust the pixel amount in the Customize menu. This is great for my old photos, some of which are quite small. I have a great photo of a Victorian family gathered under an oak tree, complete with big mustaches and wasp waists. The picture is sadly fading, but the scanned image is a great improvement and has brought back a surprising amount of lost detail simply with Auto Contrast. You can also scan documents - if you are into family trees, this means wedding certificates etc - and you can even scan useable text. The quality of this scanner is great. Unless you are a professional photographer, why spend more?

Like the previous reviewer I bought this scanner since I wanted to scan a lot of old family photos and documents. I also wanted something to use as a general purpose scanner for my home based business. The results are amazing! I cant fault this piece of kit and I've used it a lot. It's also great for scanning documents to PDF and attaching to emails etc.. The software that comes with the scanner is easy to use too. I've tried scanning at high resolution settings and lower and this scanner never fails to deliver. Negative and slides are exceptional quality too. It's very quiet - handy for scanning late into the night and not disturbing others in the house. Don't worry about parting with your hard earned cash on this scanner - just buy it - it's a real steal at this price and you will not be disappointed.

Traded up from Epson 4180 after 4 years of trouble free use to the new V500 from the award winning V Series. Huge improvement on scan speed and resolution. Colour rendition true to Epson scanners, brilliant. When coupled with Adobe's PSE version 7, makes light work of editing faded photo's. Compared to the 4180, the V500 is quiet...........really quiet. Warm up time is almost instant. Well made, not flimsy in any way. Have looked at HP's range of 6 colour scanners which although are great for documents, need a lot of tweaking to reach the instant standard of the V500. Well worth the money.

Having used this to scan in a mixture of about 1000 colour slides and photographs (no negatives yet) I think I've given it a suitable outing.

As far as scanning slides goes:
After a few hours of testing I came to the conclusion that scanning above 6400dpi is a waste of time and disk space, there's no difference when all images in higher res are scaled to same size on screen. This is not a problem as it still gives images approx 8800x6000 pixels.
I find the only software option that can't be done in post processing (Photoshop, Lightroom etc.) is the Digital ICE. This is pretty damn good! From my experience it struggles with slides older than c1985, introducing artefacts in areas of high contrast. On new slides it is pretty faultless, maybe a touch less sharp, but then that can be tweaked with a little USM in Photoshop. It deals with everything but the chunkiest of dirt and scratches so as you'd never know anything had been erased.
I prefer to leave all other options turned off so I have a copy of the slide 'as is', I can then use non-destructive editing (Adobe Lightroom) to tidy up colour and further imperfections.
Results do surpass my expectations.
To scan 4 slides at 6400dpi it takes about 12 minutes. Not fast but nowhere near as slow as others. It is worth the wait because the results are more than adequate for family snaps. Professional photographers would probably be disappointed with the optical density, but what do you expect for this price range? 99% of the time though, after a few level adjustments etc, you end up with something you'll be happy to print at just about any sensible size.

Scanning reflective:
Photos etc. seem to be turning out (on a Spyder3 calibrated screen) more or less the same as originals.
The 'Descreening' option in the software is pretty useful as this is *very* hard to do in Photoshop. I scanned an old black and white photo from a magazine that had been dot printed, or screen printed I guess. Normally, when enlarged this would have looked pretty bad, but with the descreen option it gave a superb, smoother, starting point for a few manual adjustments. I was very pleased with the resulting printed enlargements.

In Summary:
Pros - Good enough resolution, colour and general quality to satisfy all but the fussiest, or pros. Certainly fine for archiving family albums. Pretty straight forward software with good features, even the professional and fully manual scan area selection mode is easy to use. Solid build quality, after over 1000 scans nothing is coming loose or broken. Digital ICE is a must if the transparency is relatively new and good quality but maybe dirty or dusty.
Cons - Only scan 4 slides at a time. Placing multiple photos on the bed can be tricky to get straight, maybe some sort of guide grid overlay would be useful. Documentation leaves a lot to be desired, seems to give you the basics and then leaves you figure out the advanced, and possibly more obscure features, on your own. Took me ages to work out that un-ticking the 'Thumbnail' option (on by default) lets you manually select the areas to scan and manually enter scan dimensions - very useful.

I've grown up with digital photography but in the past few years have been increasingly interested in film. After amassing a hefty pile of prints and negatives and not being too happy with the resolution most photo labs provide, I purchased this Epson V500 scanner.

In my search I compared this Epson V500 to the similarly priced CanoScan 8800F Film Scanner but went with the Epson due to the inclusion of hardware-based ICE technology. I also looked at some HP photo scanner models but shied away due to some reviews noting the slow scanning speeds. Both this Epson and the Canon use an LED light source, as opposed to the old fluorescent lamps used in traditional scanners, which reduces warm-up time.

Unboxing and installing was very easy on my 13" Macbook. Sadly, the first scans weren't impressive; the software was a little fiddly to get used to and dust was showing up on my negative scans. However, after turning on the ICE (which increases scan time through scanning the transparencies with an infra-red beam) the scans came through very well, with minimal sharpening needed and almost all dust and scratches removed from the negatives.

This Epson V500 also comes with text-recognition software, to convert printed text back to digital. I found this software was very useful and with the minor exception of not being able to recognise words next to handwritten annotations, very easy to use.

A very nice flatbed scanner for scanning negatives and other transparencies. Also functions as a good traditional scanner for converting prints, paper and other documents. Highly recommended.