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I bought this scanner a month ago to scan the several thousand slides I have taken over the past years. I'm not a professional photographer my expectations were only to digitize my slides to the same quality as the photos I have been taking with my 7mp digital camera. After receiving the scanner (which set up easily) I did an extensive set of tests to determine the appropriate settings (resolution, compression, etc), and then set about scanning my slides.
Now that I am 2/3 done with the task I can say that it's working OK, but there are goods and bads. I have no experience with other film scanners so I can't say how this unit compares to others, but here's what I have learned:
* Many have complained about the flimsiness of the plastic slide holder. Mine has held up fine so far, but I can find no information anywhere about how I would get a replacement if I broke the one that came with the scanner, which concerns me a little.
* Epson's web site is not very helpful. They have a simple FAQ with some basic items, but nothing really helpful, and no discussion groups. You are on your own.
* As others have commented, the included software is pretty basic, but I think it gets the job done. It has at least 2 very annoying flaws, though. One is that every time I preview scan another set of 12 slides, it turns off the dust removal and/or digital ICE selection. This means that you need to remember to turn it back on with every scan, which I have forgotten to do some times. There appears to be a way of saving your settings, but even that gets reset on every scan, so is useless. Maybe there is a way to make this work right, but the sparse documentation yields no clues.
* Another software issue is its ability to recognize the vertical or horizontal orientation of slides. Mostly it does a really good job with this, but sometimes it guesses wrong, e.g. it will think a slide is vertical when it actually is horizontal. Usually this happens if the slide has a dark background. Unfortunately when it guesses wrong, it crops off the sides or the top/bottom of the picture, so you can't just rotate it 90 degrees. Most of the time when I notice a wrong guess I have been able to correct it by rotating the slide 90 degrees and re-previewing, but I have several slides where it simply insists on getting it wrong and the software provides no way to override this behavior. A related bad behavior occurs if you have a slide that has a bright rectangle on a dark background, e.g. a shot of TV screen in that case, it tries to zoom in on part of the picture, cropping off much of it including even some of the light area. I can find no way to defeat this behavior, so apparently the only remedy is to crop this type of image manually, which is going to be very labor intensive.
* Another problem relates to a hardware design flaw that I am very surprised that no one has mentioned. After scanning my first several batches of slides and examining the results carefully, I went into a mode of scanning without taking the time to examine every resulting image. After scanning a LOT of slides, I started reviewing the results and was horrified to notice that on certain batches, there were 2 faint vertical lines (one green, one blue) down certain scans. I finally noticed that the lines seemed to be on 4 consecutive slides out of every 12 (the slide holder contains 12 slides), so that was a clue. Notice that the top of the scanner has a transparent slit down the middle apparently this is a sexy feature so you can see where the scanner light is and watch its motion. Well, it also admits other light into the scanner, at least under certain ambient light conditions, ruining the scans of the 4 slides in the middle column. I fixed this by taping a piece of cardboard to the top of the scanner. And now I have to re-scan a lot of messed-up images.
* I really can't notice that the Digital ICE feature does anything except quadruple the amount of time it takes to scan each set of slides. I tried doing scans with it and without it, and can notice little difference. Not much of a problem, since I the Epson software de-selects the option to use it after each preview scan as mentioned above.
* I suppose it's not really a fault of the scanner, but watch out for dust! It's really important to blow off your slides before every scan, and also the scanner glass. Despite being really careful, I still have a big issue with dust. Would have been nice if Epson had included a brush and something to blow with (I got a squeeze bulb blower that helps a lot). When I am done with my scanning project I'm considering replacing the electronic air cleaner in my home with this unit, since it seems to be a dust magnet! :-)
* One last comment. This is not a general-purpose scanner, i.e. you really wouldn't want to use it as a document scanner, mainly because every time you want to use it, it needs to warm up for a minute. Fortunately I have another scanner for documents, and it works instantaneously.
It's possible that some of the items above are user error on my part, but with the meager documentation and web site, it's hard to develop a detailed understanding of the unit without a lot of experimentation, which might cause one to miss something. Your mileage might vary.
** LONG-TERM EXPERIENCE UPDATE 3/11/10:
The V700 is still working fine, after scanning at least 10,000 slides, color prints, color negatives and b&w negatives. I remain very satisfied with my purchase (I would probably upgrade my rating to 4-stars now), as it has done a lot of work for me, I've scanned a lot of stuff with good results, and it continues to work fine. In particular, I think that the V700 does a spectacular job scanning prints of any kind, and automatically recognizes where they are when you place multiple prints on the glass for a single scan but see one of the notes below!
* None of the flimsy plastic holders has broken (yet), thank goodness. I handled them very carefully. Still worried about how I would get a replacement if needed.
* Something else I learned: The V700 recognizes each of the included film/slide holders automatically, and changes a variety of settings automatically depending upon which one it recognizes like it or not. See next item.
* Besides my 35mm slides, I also have a large collection of "super slides" that were shot on 120 film. Even though these are mounted in standard 2x2 cardboard mounts, you cannot scan them in the slide holder, because each opening in that holder is in the shape of an "+" to allow for the possibility of a verticallyor horizontally-oriented 35mm slides. But since super slides are square and have much more film area that the rectangular 35mm slides, the holder blocks out part of each slide, making the holder unusable for such slides. Also, when you put the slide holder in, the scanner automatically assumes 35mm slides, and crops down automatically, thus throwing away part of each slide anyway.
Canon offers no additional holders as far as I can tell, so here's what I did: I used a different holder that would fit 4 2x2 objects, BUT turned it 180 degrees on the scanner surface. This was necessary to fool the V700, which otherwise reads some coding on the bottom of the holder and then changes the settings automatically. I believe this holder is meant for raw 6x6 cm negatives, which obviously won't work for slides. Turning it 180 degrees prevented the V700 from reading the "coding" on the bottom of that holder, and allowed it to scan the whole page without changing any setting automatically. Next, I created a set of 4 identical marquees that matched the 4 slots on the holder, and saved them with a name so I could use them as a template over and over again. With this set-up, I scanned several thousand 120 super slides just fine. Again, really watch the dust.
* One more experience item: the V700 does NOT scan all the way to the left edge or the bottom edge of the glass there seems to be a small gap near those 2 edges that is not scanned. (It does scan all the way to the top and right-hand edges.) I learned this the hard way when I was scanning prints. I started off by placing 4 6 prints on the glass for each scan, pushing each up to one of the edges to keep it squarely aligned. Eventually I noticed that I was missing a bit on a few of the edges, which I traced back to this problem. All works fine if you are aware of this issue.
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