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Don't get too worked up by the negative reviews calling the Epson Scan software "junk." It isn't. I read enough of the other reviews to convince me to download a copy of Vuescan and try it out right away. True, Vuescan has a lot of film profiles that should be more accurate than the limited number Epson uses, but the trouble with Vuescan and this V600 scanner--in my experience--is that the frames for batch scanning a group of negatives were not accurate, and it was more than a little confusing, if not impossible, to change the frames around. This feature of Vuescan is very confusing your first couple of times around, and I lost patience and shut the program down.
Then, thinking I'd better try the Epson software before considering returning the scanner, I opened Epson Scan. I went straight to "Professional" mode, checked out all the parameters they allow adjustment to, selected what I wanted, and clicked "Preview." This is scanning two strips of negatives, mind you. When the preview came up, it had all twelve frames boxed in their own boxes, all basically color-corrected and ready for action. You select a check-box to pick which frames you want to scan, and click on each separate frame to diddle with it--like rotate it to the proper orientation, or change the exposure, whatever. Then just hit "Scan" and walk away. When it finishes you have all your selected scans in your "My Pictures" folder or wherever you want them, named whatever you want with "001", "002" and so-on appended to the name. It is easy as pie, and the quality is on par with any scanner I've used so far. Speed? For a 2400 dpi neg scan much less than a minute per scan.
Now some caveats. I'm not running Digital ICE, not doing any kind of sharpening, nothing. All I want is a raw scan; all the fiddling you want to do is better done afterwards in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, it does a much better job. If your negatives need all kinds of cleaning, or if they're all scratched up and require a lot of correcting in the scan, you screwed up. Take care of your negs and slides, keep them clean, and you won't have problems scanning them. You can clean them with a quick wipe with a lint-free cloth with a little rubber cement thinner on it--just don't use anything water-based on negs and slides.
Secondly, just for grins I loaded a magazine page into the scanner and tried out the OCR software, ABBYY. They claim that it can scan and convert printed text into type. If you've had any experience with OCR software, you probably take that claim with a large grain of salt, like I did. But one quick scan--greyscale, 400 dpi--and the page was up on the screen. Pull it into Microsoft Word and it was 100 percent accurate, every word spelled correctly, even the closest font was selected for the text. An incredible job, in my opinion.
What's my qualifications? I've been working with images my whole professional life. 40 years of photography or more, working with digital images since they first came out. I've owned a dozen different flatbed scanners and a couple of film scanners. You might be able to get better results from a more expensive scanner, but for the money this Epson V600 is tough to beat. Highly recommended. And give the included software a chance, you'll probably like it just fine.
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