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I bought this scanner a month ago to scan the several thousand slides I have taken over the past years. I'm not a professional photographer - my expectations were only to digitize my slides to the same quality as the photos I have been taking with my 7mp digital camera. After receiving the scanner (which area up easily) I did an extensive site of tests to decide the appropriate settings (resolution, compression, etc), and then plot about scanning my slides.
Now that I am 2/3 done with the task I can say that it's working OK, but there are goods and bads. I have no experience with other film scanners so I can't say how this unit compares to others, but here's what I have learned:
* Many have complained about the flimsiness of the plastic trudge holder. Mine has held up blooming so far, but I can secure no information anywhere about how I would accumulate a replacement if I broke the one that came with the scanner, which concerns me a slight.
* Epson's web position is not very safe. They have a simple FAQ with some basic items, but nothing really capable, and no discussion groups. You are on your maintain.
* As others have commented, the included software is lovely basic, but I judge it gets the job done. It has at least 2 very annoying flaws, though. One is that every time I preview scan another region of 12 slides, it turns off the dust removal and/or digital ICE selection. This means that you need to remember to turn it assist on with every scan, which I have forgotten to do some times. There appears to be a device of saving your settings, but even that gets reset on every scan, so is useless. Maybe there is a procedure to manufacture this work suitable, but the sparse documentation yields no clues.
* Another software screech is its ability to peep the vertical or horizontal orientation of slides. Mostly it does a really ample job with this, but sometimes it guesses evil, e.g. it will consider a trot is vertical when it actually is horizontal. Usually this happens if the hobble has a sad background. Unfortunately when it guesses putrid, it crops off the sides or the top/bottom of the report, so you can't fair rotate it 90 degrees. Most of the time when I scrutinize a imperfect guess I have been able to honest it by rotating the bolt 90 degrees and re-previewing, but I have several slides where it simply insists on getting it gross and the software provides no contrivance to override this behavior. A related unpleasant behavior occurs if you have a fling that has a radiant rectangle on a dismal background, e.g. a shot of TV mask - in that case, it tries to zoom in on portion of the portray, cropping off remarkable of it including even some of the light position. I can gain no contrivance to defeat this behavior, so apparently the only remedy is to lop this type of image manually, which is going to be very labor intensive.
* Another quandary relates to a hardware accomplish flaw that I am very surprised that no one has mentioned. After scanning my first several batches of slides and examining the results carefully, I went into a mode of scanning without taking the time to ask every resulting image. After scanning a LOT of slides, I started reviewing the results and was afraid to study that on clear batches, there were 2 faint vertical lines (one green, one blue) down definite scans. I finally noticed that the lines seemed to be on 4 consecutive slides out of every 12 (the run holder contains 12 slides), so that was a clue. Gawk that the top of the scanner has a transparent crop down the middle - apparently this is a sexy feature so you can glance where the scanner light is and spy its motion. Well, it also admits other light into the scanner, at least under positive ambient light conditions, ruining the scans of the 4 slides in the middle column. I fixed this by taping a section of cardboard to the top of the scanner. And now I have to re-scan a lot of messed-up images.
* I really can't leer that the Digital ICE feature does anything except quadruple the amount of time it takes to scan each station of slides. I tried doing scans with it and without it, and can peruse miniature disagreement. Not grand of a dilemma, since I the Epson software de-selects the option to expend it after each preview scan as mentioned above.
* I sigh it's not really a fault of the scanner, but look out for dust! It's really well-known to blow off your slides before every scan, and also the scanner glass. Despite being really careful, I composed have a mammoth verbalize with dust. Would have been nice if Epson had included a brush and something to blow with (I got a squeeze bulb blower that helps a lot) . When I am done with my scanning project I'm considering replacing the electronic air cleaner in my home with this unit, since it seems to be a dust magnet! 
* One last comment. This is not a general-purpose scanner, i.e. you really wouldn't want to expend it as a document scanner, mainly because every time you want to employ it, it needs to warm up for a small. Fortunately I have another scanner for documents, and it works instantaneously.
It's possible that some of the items above are user error on my fraction, but with the meager documentation and web position, it's hard to manufacture a detailed conception of the unit without a lot of experimentation, which might cause one to miss something. Your mileage might vary.
I have a great collection of slides shot in the past 20 years. Lots of ample shots on FujiChrome100 and Velvia50. In the past I've had a tough time getting wonderful prints from them from regular photo labs, and pro printers cost too mighty.
I have experience with an older Nikon dash scanner, and I am getting noteworthy better results from the Epson V700 bed scanner. I seek image improvements to 6400dpi, I scan to tiff at 48bit using the Epson software, then adjust color and dissimilarity in photoshop cs2. I pick up very proper results even from some warped slides where I always had focus problems when printed in the lab. Its very spellbinding to peek these pictures again.
Despite expedient reviews of this feature, I have yet to gather an acceptable result from the included automatic dust removal, both hardware and software based. The dust is gone, replaced by unique pixelation. Great better to prefer the dust by hand using the CS2 repair tool, which works like magic for me. After dust removal I increase sharpness using luminous sharpening, and assign to jpg. Its unbelievable the detail that emerges with a microscopic sharpening. Resultant jpg is 20-35megs, but is compatible with local printer's fuji frontier printer. With the control I accumulate from manipulating and color-converting the digital image, I gather prints that near out exactly as I like, better than any enlarger-based print I've ever obtained.
I won't claim the v700 will scan better than a current dawdle scanner because I've never old-fashioned one, but the results I accept are certainly better than I expected. It is surprising to me that these chase prints are on par with what I accept from my nikon d70.
Bed scanning of slides is delicate rapidly, about 45 minutes to scan 12 slides when scanning to my pentium m laptop. It capture about a shrimp to save the obsolete slides away and plop unusual ones into the holder.
Installation was spruce easy. Fair install driver, stride in, commence scanning. But the documentation isn't so sterling. There is a lot enthusiastic in getting a honorable scan, its sort of an art. You'll need to read a bunch on the internet. When you first derive the printer, play with all the settings, scan the same stride over and over with different slide-height settings, resolutions,etc, until you gather what works for you. Have an opinion what you want to inspect, then try stuff and notice if you can manufacture it happen. Like I said above, the auto dust removal might be convenient, but the results won't withstand end scrutiny. Ditto for the scanning software based "color restoration", "sharpening", or anything else. Objective post-process the 48bit tiff in photoshop.
I played around with the included silverfast SE scanning software, but found the interface clunky and there was no functional improvement over the included epson software, so I don't consume it. The included detailed scan manipulation functions are all available in photoshop, so I don't bother.
When scanning photos (as opposed to film or slides), the resolution makes a mountainous incompatibility. Some resultions will alias the print pattern. Getting a generous scan from a print requires patience.
Outstanding product quality, but it takes work to score the best out of it.
We bought this scanner to utilize mainly for scanning medium format film.
The scanner resolution is righteous, and the ability to scan in 16 bit mode provides extended dynamic range and ability to seize subtle tone details. However, achieveing this always requires changing the default exposure levels, particularly on the obscene ruin of the scale. A limitation of the software, however, is that the histogram tool for setting the levels always shows the scale in a linear 8 bit mode (0 to 255 levels), whereas a log scale or optical density scale would probably be more appropriate for 16 bit scans. Photshop also does not have this feature but would befriend from it.
A more troubling pickle we have experienced is that all our film scans require changing the gamma of the blue channel significantly in order to execute color balance. Once we had that figured out, the results have been generous.
The software documentation is glorious lame, as usual.
As far as film handling goes, the drag holders seem adequate, but the film holders feel like they are going to atomize every time you employ them. The medium format holder only holds the film by the long edges, which doesn't provide noteworthy serve. One solution for this would be to improvise a filmholder which is like an enlarger holder in that it clamps the film on opposite sides of the image. The Epson filmholders have holes in them that the scanner uses to detect the holder type, and the software does a satisfactory job of detecting the borders of each image and presenting them all to you in the preview window.
Despite these nit-picks, this scanner is an reliable value. The scans we are getting off of Fuji Velvia 100 are breathtaking. I hope that the availability of these will renew interest in medium and stout format film, as these offer creative options which are impossible with digital cameras.
