Epson Perfection 3200 Photo

Epson Perfection 3200 Photo Review

by Richard Jantz

- WHAT'S HOT: The powerful Epson Perfection 3200 Photo is designed for advanced users. This 48-bit color scanner provides USB 2.0 (also compatible with USB 1.1) and FireWire interfaces. As you'd expect of a professional-level unit, it can scan both reflective and transparent materials; its 4-by-9-inch transparency area and three sturdy film holders are less typical. But what really sets this model apart is its 3200-dpi resolution, higher than we've seen before in this class of scanner. The advantages of this ultrahigh resolution will appeal primarily to photographers, designers, and other graphics professionals--image files captured at a high resolution are very large, and the additional data is unlikely to be practical for users without graphics training. With 3200 dpi you can make bigger enlargements (than you can with a 2400-dpi model) before you begin to lose image quality or detail. For example, at 3200 dpi you can capture enough pixels from a 35mm slide to enlarge the image to 11 by 14 inches at a printer resolution of nearly 300 dpi. Imagine blowing up a postage stamp to fill the front of a sweatshirt, and you'll have an idea of what this scanner can do. Tested using its USB 2.0 interface, the Perfection 3200 Photo demonstrated good speed in most--but not all--of our scan tests. The 3200 performed faster than most other corporate models on lower-resolution (300-dpi or less) tests, but it fell behind the pack on our test at 1200 dpi. For example, it knocked off a 300-dpi full-page scan of black-and-white line art at a brisk 15 seconds (the fastest score among corporate scanners), but took nearly a minute to scan a 2-by-2-inch color photo at 1200 dpi, about 20 seconds longer than the fastest model (the Microtek ScanMaker 8700 Pro Design) took to finish the same test. Still, the 3200 scored well enough across the board to land in second place for overall performance among the corporate models we compared for our May 2003 issue. With the exception of our 600-dpi gray-scale photo test, the 3200's times were all faster than those of its predecessor, the discontinued Perfection 2450 Photo, which we tested using FireWire.