HardwareCentral - Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner Review

Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner Review

Still a Place for Standalone Scanners

October 20, 2009
By Aaron Weiss

With the rise in popularity of multi-function printer/scanner/fax devices over the last few years, the standalone desktop scanner might seem to be an endangered species, especially around the office. Don't be fooled. The standalone scanner is still alive and well, and with good reason — MFP's have their place, but they have their disadvantages, too.

For one, an MFP tends to be a large and bulky appliance hogging a lot of desk space. Also, if you or your staff need to run print jobs and scan jobs at the same time, an MFP will quickly become a bottleneck since it can't do both simultaneously. If either the printer or scanner components of an MFP need downtime for repairs, you're out both devices. On top of all that, the scanners built-into MFP's may not offer the same quality and feature set of a standalone scanner, such as film negative scanning.

Enter the Epson Perfection V500 ($349.99), which aims to be a facile office scanner and then some, offering a range of scanning features from an automatic document feeder to 2400-DPI color negative scans. Epson has tried to design the V500 to be comfortable in both the document-heavy office environment and the restore-and-touch-up-old-photos home environment.

The V500 Office Unwrapped

The sleek black V500 Office occupies a footprint just under 11x19 inches (slightly larger with the automatic document feeder lid in place). At just under 5 inches high (8 inches with ADF) the scanner is not the thinnest unit on the market, but is still reasonable svelte.

Two separate lids are included with the V500 Office. The "TPU" (transparency unit) lid is used when scanning film negatives or 35mm slides. The "ADF" lid accepts a stack up to 30 pages of paper up to 8.5 x 14 inches for batch scans. Using either lid you can scan documents placed directly on the flatbed glass such as pages, photos, and books.

The Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner with included 30-page ADF lid.

Both lids include floating hinges so that they can rest flat on thick or bulky objects like a book. That said, the hinge offers only a couple inches of travel — for very large objects you can simply position the lid vertically so that it is out of the way.

On the rear of the scanner is a power jack, a USB 2.0 "B" style connector, and a round multi-pin jack for the lid. Each lid has a short cable that must be plugged into this jack — the cable on the ADF lid in particular is quite short and thus slightly trickier to connect.

The front of the scanner features several quick-access buttons: PDF, e-mail, copy and scan. The precise behavior of each of these buttons, such as which applications they launch, can be configured via the included Epson Event Manager.

The Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner with included 12-frame, 4-slide film holder.

Finally, there is a rocker-style power switch on the right side of the scanner. Note that this scanner does not include a network jack — you must use the USB connection directly to a host machine. Although it may be possible to share the scanner over a network, you'll need to use operating system or third-party features on the host machine to do so.

Software for Both Macs and Windows (Windows 7, Too)

Epson includes a CD with drivers and software for both Windows (2000 and above, including Windows 7) and Mac OS X. Epson's own "Epson Scan" software is the hub of this suite, which you use to preview, configure and execute each scan.

Epson Scan itself offers four modes of operation, each with a somewhat different interface: full auto, home, office and professional. Each mode presents increasing sets of features and options, although it can be a little confusing to switch between modes looking for the easiest way to set up a particular scan.

Depending on which mode you are in, you can apply several interesting image enhancements to your scan. "Text enhancement" will darken text in a document, so that it can be easier to parse by OCR (optical character recognition software). The "Auto Area Segmentation" mode will attempt to automatically distinguish between text and image areas of a document, scanning the text in black and white (again, for optimal OCR performance) and the images in grayscale (for quality).

You can also select to "Dropout" either red, green or blue — for example, if you scan a text document with a background color that you'd like removed. Additional image modifiers include sharpening, de-screening, brightness and contrast.

For photos you can apply "Dust removal" and/or Epson's "Digital ICE" filter. Digital ICE is a technology that uses infrared (for film) or multiple lamps (for prints) to detect and remove dust, scratches, and other so-called "surface defects".

Also included with the V500 Office is Abbyy FineReader, a basic OCR application, and Adobe Photoshop Elements, a stripped-down but still quite powerful version of Photoshop.

Let There Be Light — LED Inside

The V500 office is one of the newer scanners to use an LED-based lamp rather than the older CCFL. This new mercury-free light source uses about 10-20 percent less energy than those older scanners and does not experience color shift as they age.

Best of all, LED lamps light instantly and require no warm-up time, allowing the scanner to begin scanning with minimal delay even from a cold start.

Next: Let's Scan »

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