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Epson Perfection 4990 A4 Colour Scanner USB
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Average customer review:
Product Description
Epson Perfection Photo 4990 Scanner
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #68746 in Consumer Electronics
- Brand: Epson
- Model: B11B175022
- Released on: 2005-03-11
- Platform: Mac OS X
- Dimensions: 14.77 pounds
Features
- Epson Perfection Photo 4990 Scanner
Editorial Reviews
Manufacturer's Description
The Epson Perfection 4990 Photo is the ideal scanner for the professional photographer and enthusiast. It handles all standard film and photo formats, restores torn or damaged originals and delivers stunning quality scans which are ready to print, enlarge or archive.
The Epson Perfection 4990 Photo has a powerful 4800 x 9600dpi resolution and 4.0DMax optical density. This ensures you retain the quality and colour of your originals, and enables you to produce amazingly clear, detailed enlargements.
With the large 8 x 10 film adapter, you are provided with the flexibility to scan multiple film formats and in large volumes, saving you time and trouble. It also has a moving blue Light Emitting Diode (LED) that enables you to track the progress of your scan.
And this scanning solution includes all the software you need for total control over your images. With Digital ICE " you can restore precious memories by removing scratches, tears and dust from film and photos. While Epson Creativity Suite software allows easy image previewing and retrieval and the acclaimed SilverFast® SE6 and Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 2.0 enable image enhancement and editing.
Box Contents
Customer Reviews
Excellent all-round scanner
I bought this scanner as I wanted a flatbed A4 scanner as well as a high quality slide/negative scanner, and being touted as the top of the range Epson flatbed scanner I was confident it would deliver.
The breadth of scanning medium supported by the 4990 is impressive: slide film, negative film, medium format, A4 paper. There is a tendency to expect that a "jack of all trades" scanner will not be very good but that is not the case here.
In terms of quality, the real test for a scanner is how it handles slide/negative film since that is such a small area. However, the A4 scanning ability is faultless in my view - crisp, relatively fast and does exactly what I would have expected. Software provided with the scanner allows you to photocopy a multi-page document, particularly useful if you have a PDF print driver as it means you can produce a multi-page scanned document in one go.
That said, if you are looking for just A4 scanning then this is probably a bit over-the-top for your needs - it is really as a multi-purpose scanner that the Epson delivers. The slide scanner supports 8 slides being scanned at once using a stencil which is placed on the scanning plate - this is in my view rather poorly designed as once scanned it is actually quite tricky to remove the slides from the scanning plate. No such problems with the negative scanning, where 24 negatives are scanned at once using a stencil with slots for rows of up to 6 negatives. Once the stencil is removed the negatives come off with it.
As expected there is a preview and then a scan feature with all the expected functionality. For negatives, the colours are inverted on preview making it easy to see what you have scanned. The preview feature also works out where the photos it is scanning are located on the scanning plate and gets it right nearly all the time. It does struggle a bit on night shots or indoor evening shots where the background is dark (on one occasion it was convinced one slide I was scanning was in fact two photos; the only way round this was to manually select the frame from the overall scan, not a big problem).
DigitalICE for high quality dust removal, unsharp mask, level management, contrast/brightness configuration are all included although I was a little disappointed by the exposure management - there is an auto-exposure facility which is good, but I found that for dark photos it underexposes a lot which is difficult to counter with the other controls available
The 4800dpi scanning facility is a useful feature, good if you are looking to print to beyond A4, although I've tended to use 2400dpi and find this gives fine results up to A4. Likewise support for 48-bit colour is included but I've found 24-bit to be adequate.
The slide scanning is not fast, but then you would not expect it to be - it is comparable if not slightly faster than equivalent slide scanners I have used, and provides a similar level of result in my view (apart from the issue about exposure compensation).
So to conclude: this is a very good multi-purpose scanner - I was disappointed by the slide tray making it awkward to remove the slides, and the results on dark photos can be difficult to predict, but generally the results are superb and being an all-in-one scanner I would say it's very good value for money. When choosing which scanner you buy (the Epson range is broad) I would recommend not to be oversold on the high resolution and colour levels supported, as you must ask yourself whether these are needed. However, I would recommend DigitalICE as essential for slide scanning.
At present Canon 9950F's main competitor - is it better ?
I use a Canon 9950F scanner at home, but chose this Epson Perfection 4990 for work use (to scan things like very hi-res B&W TEM negatives as well as 35mm slides). So how do the two very similar priced and spec'd scanners compare? Well essentially in terms of the quality of 35mm negative and slide scans there is nothing in it. Both scanners provide high quality images at 2400 dpi but the miniscule gains in scanning at 4800dpi simply aren't worth the 4x increase in file size (to nearer 100Mb). By comparing scan quality from both machines I really couldn't find any significant difference at all. This is echoed by the very useful in-depth reviews of both scanners at independent http://www.photo-i.co.uk .
The Canon 9950F has the advantage of scanning 12 slides or 30 negatives at a go compared to the Epson's 8 slides or 24 negatives. The Canon is definitely a bit better built and put together (e.g. fitting the reflective plate is really fiddly on the Epson and their 35mm slide holder design makes removing slides slightly more tricky). Canon's in-house FARE dust removal is similar and a little faster than Epson Digital ICE (Kodak) dust removal. However Epson score's highly with its far better TWAIN software nd can scan up to full A4 negatives (the Canon is fixed to it's film holder sizes to 4x5 inch max). Both scanners are now supplied with Silverfast SE (Silverfast.com). This is less useful for the Canon as Silverfast doesn't support FARE, although it does allow the Canon to scan negatives to A4. In order to get more functionality out of the Canon I have upgraded to Silverfast Ai for another $115 (still no FARE support though) - whereas with this Epson 4990 I am happy with the Epson TWAIN interface. This Epson 4990 also deals with odd film sizes like my childhood Kodak Instamatic 125 slides that are square rather than 35mm oblong - the Canon 9950F twain driver is so useless it chops off the top and bottom to fit them to 35mm size (and you can't do anything about it unless you use Silverfast without FARE dust removal instead). Plus Sivlerfast supports ICE on this Epson.
Scanned image quality is a little soft with 35mm film on both scanners compared to a Nikon slide scanner (although the out-of-focus effect at 100% is also because the scanners have a higher resolution than the film grain). Things like shadows and sharpen are best left to Photoshop post-processing rather than using the TWAIN options (I do use Photoshop CS2 not 'elements' as supplied). So the 35mm scans require things like Unsharp Mask (USM) and shadow/highlight. In fairness all digital camera images are normally highly image processed (e.g. noise reduced, colour balanced and sharpened) by the camera, so expect to use Scan/Scangear or Photoshop to do the same with scans. The 35mm film image quality is very good for the price, particularly with ~100 ASA slide, and very similar to that of the Canon 9950F (and appears rather better than results from my dedicated 35mm 2700dpi Benq Scanwit 2740S film scanner, particularly for cheap 400 ASA colour negatives and shadows - although these flatbed scanners need more twain and post-scan tweaking to get the best results).
Scanning quality on anything else like photographs, A4 paper or large format negatives is naturally top notch, as the optimal resolution of 2400 dpi of these scanners is well beyond that of the source material - or the resulting image file size would be too enormous for any home/office use anyway. Even professionals would find these scanners OK for large 4x5" and larger negatives or working copies of 35mm. I have compared this Epson's and the Canon's output to that of £12,000 Imacon Flextight 484 drum scanner, and for my old consumer 100 ASA slides and film, there's very little difference in image quality - the Flextight fuzz is a little sharper at full mag and dark shadows are resolved a tiny bit better with less noise (and don't need `shadow/highlight'), but that's all - naturally the Flextight scans at for higher speeds though. So this Epson's a highly recommended and incredibly versatile scanner - although also check out it's new upmarket stable mates the Epson V700 and V750 at Amazon. These flatbed scanners have few benefits over far cheaper stable-mates if you don't want to scan film or photographs though.
Superb bit of kit!!!
I used to have a dedicated film scanner, it would only scan 35mm and when I eventually went on to Windows XP it wouldn't work. This Epson 4990 is a godsend. I shoot mainly 120 and 35mm colour transparancies ( yes I hate digital cameras!) The scans I've made with this machine are so clear it's hard to believe that a flatbed scanner was able to produce results like this. If you are a pro or amateur you won't be dissappointed, just make sure you clean any minute grains of fluff or dust from the glass carrier because it will reproduce these on your scans. No problem if you use image editing software as I'm sure you all do. Yes I give this machine five stars because Epson have made something I wholly approve of.
