Epson Perfection V500 Office Color Scanner Review

Thanks in part to the V500 Office's LED lamp, the scanner delivers a full page on the flatbed at 300 DPI in a matter of seconds. Scanned text is sharp and clear, and for high-quality sources like books and laser-printed documents, the scan is a very close match to the original.

Likewise, color documents produce vivid scans with impressive accuracy for use in a home or office environment.

To scan color negatives, I insert two strips of six frames each into the film holder and removed the matte from the lid to reveal the transparency strip. The plastic film holder is well-marked and easy to understand — after securing the negatives in place, notches on the film holder line up with dimples on the flatbed allowing you to effortlessly line up the film on the scanner.

Upon preview, Epson Scan identifies each frame and displays a thumbnail summary, from where you can select which frames to scan. High-DPI scans of color negatives are noticeably slower than typical documents. Scanning four frames at 600 DPI took at least five minutes (more with Digital ICE enabled) — but keep in mind that this is actually not a bad showing for film scanning, which on older scanners can take several times longer.

While film professionals can demand a lot from negative scans, the V500 Office results are very good to the layman's eye — detailed and in focus, the home or office user can certainly make good use of this scanner to digitize old film-based pictures.

That said, most offices are more likely to spend time with the automatic document feeder than scanning film. So I switched lids and loaded a stack of 30 pages, the rated capacity of the V500 Office ADF.

The V500 Office claims to scan up to 3 pages per minute through the ADF, which seems plausible at lower DPI. The best performance, of course, comes in grayscale or black-and-white scanning. I did find that the ADF did not always fully release each completed page, causing a bit of a logjam in the ADF paper output slot. While the ADF is certainly convenient and efficient for batch scanning, I'm not sure I would load it full and simply walk away.

Also, it would have been nice to see a full-duplex ADF that could scan both sides of sheet on one pass — with the V500 Office you'll have to manually flip over the output stack and re-scan for double-sided documents.

Doing the DPI Math

Like most manufacturers, Epson marketing emphasizes an ultra-high DPI (6400) for the V500 Office. In practice, you'll never scan at a DPI this high and, more importantly, the scanner's optimal image quality will be achieved at a much lower density. This is true of scanners in general and not a knock against the V500 office, just a word of marketing caution.

For scanning, copying, and archiving office documents there is hardly ever a need to scan above 300DPI (if not half that), otherwise all you wind up with is giant files containing the same image information.

When scanning color negatives, the Epson Scan software allowed me to choose up to 4800 DPI — but even published books require images only at 600dpi. The important point being that, whatever the pros and cons of considering a scanner like the V500 Office, advertised DPI should not be one of them.

A Scanner Compromise

Clearly the V500 Office is designed to appeal to two markets: the home or small office with both light duty document management needs who also want to the capability to manage color photo prints and film.

Despite Epson's inclusion of "Perfection" in the product name, the V500 Office is something of a compromise. But "compromise" need not be a dirty word. Like with any compromise, there are products out there that better excel at one or the other — you'll find scanners with more robust, full-duplex ADF's, and you'll find scanners with larger-capacity film trays, for example. But unlike those (often more expensive) models, the V500 Office performs at a solid B level in each realm, making it more than enough scanner for many buyers in this price range.

And unlike those ubiquitous MFP units, you won't need to wait for a huge print job to finish before running a quick scan.