Review on Epson Perfection 1670 Photo Scanner by Trae Joubert

In the interest of full disclosure I was only interested in using the scanner to scan family slides and returned the scanner a week later. On the plus side, installation in Windows XP was a breeze. Epson includes a high-speed USB 2.0 cable, which was a nice touch since most companies cut corners here. I was also intrigued by the "retouch old faded photos" software. I've had a lot of experience with Epson scanners in the past: I've found that Epson scanners have historically been some of the fastest and most accurate, and they've historically included the best free OCR software. I was disappointed that this scanner included ABBYY's OCR software which is inferior to the Epson software that came with last year's scanners. (See CNET's OCR software reports.) Once connected, I scanned the photo using the software that came with it and the automatic settings. The scan went well. I was a little surprised that the default auto settings scan at 300 dpi (whether for photos or slides), but higher settings produce images large enough (initially uncompressed) in megabytes to fit my relatively new Dell computer with 128 megabytes of RAM slow down. Scanning the photos was quick. Things didn't go so well when scanning slides. While the software is fairly easy to manage, whether in automatic or manual settings, a few annoyances stand in the way of an otherwise fairly successful package. First, the scanning software uses overlapping windows for (concurrent) windows like the Preview window, Scanned Image window, and Manual Settings window, but none of them have separate tabs or "buttons" in the Windows XP taskbar, so it's tricky pushing everyone aside to find the others. I'm not sure how they even managed to do that as I've never used a program in XP that didn't create a taskbar button that corresponds to an open window. Annoying at first, but after three days it became incredibly annoying, since it not only interferes with the scanner windows themselves, which hide each other from time to time, but also makes multitasking with any other programs very cumbersome. When the scanner is scanning, sometimes its software window doesn't hide, and if you then hide it, you can't bring it back to the front without minimizing other programs' windows, or it brings the wrong window to the front. The way Epson can order a professionally working software application but have it without the appropriate window tabs is typical of today's user-unfriendly software trying to hit the market. I suppose it doesn't matter if you're scanning random parts, but it certainly isn't fun if you're scanning a family photo album. a scan that wasn't TOO blurry. Since some of my slides were taken by professional photographers and look crystal clear on the wall, I gave up on my project and returned the scanner. Why spend a week converting family slides to permanent sharing and archiving and get blurry scans? I've read that this is a common problem with inexpensive scanners: I suspect that if you take the slide out of the white cardboard frame to let it lie perfectly flat they might be sharp, but I don't want to ruin my shot. slides. It seems to me that if they could put an auto focus mechanism in very cheap cameras, they could find a way to automatically focus slides in this slide scanner.