Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Sheetfed Scanner - B11B176011 - Quality. Performance. Precision.
Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Scanner

I needed a scanner that had OCR capability. I have to translate a good number of documents from foreign languages, and I only have hard copies of some of these documents, so using the scanner with the ABBYY software (OCR) that came with it does the job very well. For those of you who need good translation software, I recommend Systran (which I also purchased from Buy.com for a good deal). The flatbed is roomy enough so that you can place and scan two pages at a time from a small book. The scanning is a breeze, and if you want to scan your photos, the quality is excellent and the process is painless and fast. I will be scanning negatives soon and look forward to using the included slide holder.
 
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This scanner works great! I scanned all my old photographs from way back in the 80's and 90's. can do (4) 3x5s at once. and seperates the phots into specific files. very simple to use too.
 
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I purchased this scanner specifically to scan slides and negatives. After about 1500 pictures, I am quite pleased. Here is some info that I couldn't locate when I was looking to purchase: 1. You can scan 4 slides at a time. 2. You can scan 10 negatives at a time. 3. The software divides the pictures up reliably for each format. 4. You can individually rotate each picture and set the scanning attributes for each picture separately or all together. 5. You can control the file location and the file name for each set scanned. It took me a while to get the results that I wanted. You can save the settings that you want so that they are automatically set every time you scan EXCEPT for the "Unsharp Filter". It defaults to this filter every single time, and you manually have to de-select it. I found that this filter adds odd digital artifacts at the dark/light interfaces, so I won't use it. The digital ICE technology is truly impressive. It slows the process down (for my settings from about 1 minute per slide to about 2 minutes per slide), but the results are incredible. Overall a very usable unit.
 
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Happy with the scanner. Somewhat slow in high quality mode, but works as expected and there are no complaints. Using it primary for color slides.
 
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Easy to use and has so many features. I fell in love from the moment I got it. I literally scanned every last picture and document lying around the house. The best feature about it is that you can put more than one picture in at a time and it scans it as separate pictures. Also when you get professional pictures done, the wallet size pics are not cut out, when scanned it gives you a scan of a single pic by itself and then a second scan of all the pics together. That is so cool. The quality is so great. It also acts as a photocopier. Good buy you can't go wrong with this one.
 
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This is great. Easy to set-up, if you just want a flat bed I love it. It is a little slower then my HP but all the details in the pictures are better. And the scan of the negatives are so great that you wouldn't be able to tell if I had them printed by someone else. I already had a Epson printer and I bought this printer just for my art work. So I didn't want to replace it with just any old printer. This is my third scanner that I've had. I also like that you can turn the lights off on this when not in use, has an of on switch. And this got here on time. So I love dealing with Buy.com great company. Thank-you
 
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Very happy with this scanner. A bit slow on some scans, but can't beat the value.
 
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Easy setup, fast scanning and precise output. OCI Reader is doing a great job. No hassle with software installation and user friendly application. Over all great product for home and office. I recommend.
 
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I bought this scanner to preserve my old 35mm negatives in digital form. It did the job effectively. Ofcourse, scanning negatives at high resolution takes time. But think of more than $300 I might have to spend on professional services (for my ~600 negatives) Now i own the scanner for $78. Note: If film scanning is not a requirement, one would get good scanners (or all-in-one printers) at far better prices. While it does a remarkable job with negatives, it does an extraordinary job when it comes to normal scanning (reflective) Buy.com had the best offer and I received the product on the 3rd day inspiteof the Free Shipping, which should've taken minimum 7 days
 
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I have lately used the lightweight Canon Lido series scanners only to have two of them quit just after one year (go figure). Being a guy with a lot of old negatives, pictures and memories from the past I decided to move up to this scanner after reading the glowing reviews, especially about the negative scanning capabilities and the speed. It is a lot faster than my previous Canon's and Epson, so the task of scanning isn't so bad and the quality is great! The other bonus is the Adobe Elements that comes bundled; it's a bit of an odd duck version 2.0 that isn't supported currently by Adobe, but works well and is a welcome addition to the tools.
 
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I am very pleased with scanner and its packaged software. The performance on color negatives is excellent and the document scanner does a very good job. Scanning a large number of slides or negatives is very time consuming which is not unexpected at this price point. The automatic mode does not work properly with Vista. The other modes are fine. The help function is rather shallow particularly with regard to resolution levels and the capabilities of the scanner.
 
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I love this machine. About 700 pictures have been scanned and no problems to report. It is easy to set up and use. The price is right and the quality is excellent. The professional mode gives me plenty of latitude to be creative and the full auto mode makes scanning multi images a breeze.
 
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I hate this scanner. I have tried several weeks to scan unmounted slides and negatives and it keeps trimming them. I have turned off the trimming, tried different settings and continues not to get the original full size of the negative and unmounted slide. It can't even see low key lighting or underexposed exposures in my negatives. I m going to get rid of this as soon as possible and buy a Canon scanner. This thing has been a wast of my money and time.
 
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I have tested out this scanner on computers running Microsoft Vista and Microsoft XP and happy to report they both work just fine. The scanned copies are of exellent quality and I really like the feature of scanning something into a pdf file format. So I recommend this usb flatbed scanner to anyone looking for a good quality scanner and not an all-in-one scanner/printer unit as it scans only, just what I was looking for.
 
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A bit slower than I expected, but overall great value. I`ve scanned forty year old slides and restored them to todays quality!
 
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I have had this scanner a couple of weeks and find it a little slow but very good in quality. Mostly I have been scanning old slides which only holds 4 slides at a time. Once I got the settings tweeked to keep quality up but not taking forever, I find it takes about 3 minutes to process 4 slides start to finish - You be the judge if that is slow - this is my first experience with scanning slides.
 
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I bought this scanner for the specific purpose of scanning old 35mm slides. The scanner does an amazing job for the money! It can scan up to four slides at a time in about four minutes a clip. Not too bad because you can set it to scan and work with your computer in the background while it scans and automatically saves each slide. If you are looking for an inexpensive, easy to use scanner to preserve old memories, this is it!
 
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Shipped as promised. Epson makes very reliable scanners.
 
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BEST BUY FOR THE MONEY WITH TONS OF FEATURES,EXCELLENT RESOLUTION AND EASY TO USE.
 
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This scanner is great. The resolution is superb. Setup was easy, but the instructions are written very poorly. What is said on paper does not necessarily coincide with what you may see on the computer screen. The software could us some improvement, like setting up a default folder in which to save your scans. With some experimentation and computer knowledge this scanner is the best in reproducing anything you want to scan.
 
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While I still have some experimenting to do with the many possible settings, I am already quite impressed with this scanner. It is not the fastest in the world, but it creates great images from slides. Some of my 36 year old slides have quite a bit of dust on them, and the dust removal usually works very well. Occasionally I have had to change the settings and re-scan to fully eliminate the dust from the image, but it is amazing how clean they do come out when I get the right combination of settings for the particularly dirty slide. I am quite pleased with this purchase and would recommend it to anyone who is picky, but is on a budget.
 
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I got this scanner to replace myy old Epson which was not Vista compatable. Works fine, although a bit sluggish waiting for the Epson software to reload between each scan.
 
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I have purposely waited a month before making any comments about my new Epson perfection 4490 Photo scanner. I can now describe it in one word, "OUTSTANDING". I have lot of 35mm slides all the way back to when I was in Korea in the 50ties! (so now you know I am old and probably don't know much about what to do with electronics , which I don't) I had a well-known brand scanner that would scan slides, (one at the time) and it's software gave me and my computer constant fits and freeze ups! I fought with this thing and their so called support for years and finally gave up . I installed this Epson in 5 minutes, and was scanning old slides in 10 minutes! On the automatic setting 4 slides scan at once in a reasonable time (between 5 & 10 minutes) and does an outstanding beautiful job! In the home or professional mode with additional duties to perform the process can be a bit slower but again the results are outstanding. Old hard to recognize color pictures (from way back when color film first came out) turn out in full color and in great detail. Black and white negatives also come out great as digital pictures and I have already a CD full of old pictures from all these sources. Copying documents is a snap and the scratch and dust removal on pictures from the late 1800rds that I scanned really works! Again, when you use these extra settings the process takes a bit longer. To the great enjoyment of other family members, the push of one button sent long forgotten pictures to them while I was doing the scanning anyway so I was not the only one happy with this scanner. One last comment, and that is if things don't seem to work the way you think it should there is always " HELP" which even I found to be easy to understand and to find what I did wrong. Well one more comment , for the price I paid at BUY.com with their great quick delivery service , I couldn't be happier with this purchase! Jack G. vW
 
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I bought this scanner for restoring old photos and storing many that I had before the days of digital. I was very satisfied. You get a great quality and it's about as easy to use as anything you could want. My only complaint is that when you scan with the highest resolution, it can take quite a bit of time for the computer to convert it. But I'd say that has more to do with the computer than the scanner. Anyone who wants this to deal with pictures should be very happy with this product.
 
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It seems to be a very good scanner. If I scan a photo, the scanned image appears to be the same as the original. There is a lot of potential in this scanner and the software that comes with it. You would have to spend a lot of time with both to really be critical of this scanner. It seems to do a much better job than the expensive professoinal scanners sold a few years ago. It's much cheaper to buy this scanner than to pay someone if you have more than about 10 to 20 photos to scan. The photoshop elements software that came with the scanner was helpful getting me ready to use photoshop cs2. In spite of the fact that the software that comes with the scanner is easy to work with, Epson or Buy.com should include a brief paper for people having trouble to just explain how to scan and print out photos without reading a manual.
 
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This is the best scanner I have ever had. High quality work, and it even scans transparencies of high quality in high resolutions. I like the software too. For the Macintosh it is great.
 
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It's quiet, compact, and does a decent job visually. The auto-clean function is nice but not perfect (that's what Photoshop is for!). As for ease-of-use: how complex can a scanner be? So I guess it's OK there as well. All-in-all, a nice scanner for the price.
 
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Ordered mine from buy.com after reading numerous reviews on a few different sites and checking the return policies. The scanner works fine. Its slower on negatives. I didn't have any problems with the set up or software installation on Windows XP.
 
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The scanner was so easy to set up and use. I had been looking for a decent flat bed scanner (have a look at Best Buy or Circuit City and see what rubbish they have on offer, it's shocking) that I could use for work, but was also capable of scanning and digitizing all those hundreds of slides I have tucked away in a box - the results were fantastic. The scanner in combination with the Adobe Photoshop elements sofware are perfect. I can now pretty much do anything, and it's so easy to use. If you want a high end scanner for photo's and don't want to pay a high end price - this is the baby! Buy.com is where I buy all my computer hardware, I have no idea why anyone wouldn't come here first!
 
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I bought this scanner to replace an older Microtek. I was looking for something with higher resolution than I previously had. After reading reviews, the Epson 4490 sounded right for me. I've tried scanning negatives in the past, but never bothered to save any -- the quality was so bad. As a lark, I tried scanning some 35mm color negatives with the 4490. I am so impressed! I have a ton of negatives from pictures my dad took, some of them 65 years old. I just finished scanning some black and white 35mm negatives from 1944. They are fantastic. The only complaint I have is with the film holder. It works fine with flat strips of negatives. The ones I'm scanning have been stored in the original film canister. It's difficult to uncurl the negatives while fitting them in the holder. But I'll deal with that. I'm not a professional photographer, but for someone wanting to save old photographs, the Epson 4490 is great! I just can't tell you how much fun I'm having looking at old images, many of which I had never seen before.
 
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I bought this scanner with the specific intention of scanning 35mm negatives into my computer. I couldn't afford, and don't want to convert to, a digital SLR, so I figured this was a good alternative. I figured I'd scan a couple of really good pictures from every roll in case I wanted to blow them up later. The problem is, with the Digital ICE software and Adobe Photoshop that comes with the scanner, it's hard not to put the whole roll on there. Quite simply, the results are stunning. Even rather dull-looking pictures can be spruced up with the software available, and the resolution of this baby is higher than most people will ever need. I would definately recommend this scanner. And make sure you buy it at Buy.com. How the hell does a place like Best Buy stay in business with these guys around? Oh, and they beat Best Buy's price. If you need a really good scanner for a really good price, stop looking and buy the Epson Perfection 4490 from Buy.com right now.
 
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