Epson Perfection 2480

Reviewed by: bs_price

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Produces good scans with good color fidelity quickly. Slide and negative scanning works well. Optional automatic photo feeder lid works very well.

Weaknesses: Substantially bigger than my Canon Lide scanner - but it does more and is much faster.

Overall Evaluation: I wish it were smaller, but this works faster than any of the other scanners I've had and produces very nice scans. I had a Visioneer whose color fidelity I could never get right (and I'm not a purist or professional - it was really obvious), while this looks just right with no tweaking. It took me a little while to figure out the scanning software/TWAIN driver options, so I would say this is a little less intuitive than other software I have used, but getting the hang of scanning with other than the default options still was pretty straightforward. I haven't used the photoediting software (I'm sticking with what I have and already know) or the OCR software (never need to do OCR), so I can't comment on that.Negative scanning works very well - but getting all the dust off is a pain (nothing to do with the scanner - it's just that dust looks much bigger when you blow it up in a slide scan than when you scan a print). I did not have much luck with trying the settings for scratch/dust removal to get rid of same.I got this scanner in part because there was a $100 Compusa.com rebate on the version with the automatic photo feeder (the 2480 Limited Edition). This is a very nice feature if you have stacks of photos you want to scan and the negatives are not immediately at hand. With the rebate, the whole thing was cheaper than the scanner alone elsewhere.With the backlighting of negatives and slides, and the need to power a motor for the optional photo feeder lid, the lid needs power and the scanner can't be bus-powered. But Epson nicely has a cord coming out of the adapter brick so it only takes 1 normal-sized plug-in space.