Review on 🖨️ Epson Expression Flatbed Scanner 12000XL-GA by Hector Watkins

I collect animated images which I scan to put in my online gallery and so on. Most pieces will not fit on a standard A4 / US Legal sized scanner, so the size of this unit is great for me. The 12000XL scans my images sharp and bright. It's amazingly fast at 300dpi. If you need wide format scanning I highly recommend this scanner. I bought this unit to upgrade an Epson 10000XL which still works and has served me well for several years. As you'd expect, this scanner is large and heavy - you'll need to plan a space for it in advance. It has a small, fairly noisy, high-frequency fan that runs when active, which might annoy some users. The fan turns off when the scanner goes into sleep mode. The scanner itself gets a five star rating, but the software package deserves a warning and makes me deduct a star. At a low level, Epson offers a very basic "Epson Scan" utility that has almost no options - at best it can be used for undemanding document scanning. In theory there is a plug-in to scan directly into Photoshop, but it's so slow it's useless. Another possibility is a copy of a commercial application called SilverFast AI, which is extremely powerful but illogical to the point of perversity. Nothing this program does makes sense in the traditional GUI application paradigm. If you want to use SilverFast, read the instructions carefully (really!) and be prepared to spend a lot of time trying it out. Many of SilverFast's features overlap with those of Photoshop, so if Photoshop is your destination, you'll need to decide which tool to use for the job. I currently use SilverFast for scanning, but with a custom, simplified workflow that includes only the tools I need. I fiddled for hours to get the setup I wanted, but now I'm pretty happy with it - I scan to TIFF with SilverFast and then drag and drop the TIFF images into Photoshop to create layered PSDs. I recommend this scanner. With the SilverFast/12000XL combination you can achieve high performance and great results. Just be prepared to spend some time struggling and experimenting to figure out how to get it to do what you want.