Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE: a year and 10 months, 3000 + slides and photos into the project Still liking this scanner. no issues. one small thing to note...on the slide holder there are 4 little height adjustments in the corners. Since you can't focus this scanner, those are there for that purpose. it actually does make a little bit of a difference to adjust those. not much, but some. I didn't think it was doing anything, but after scanning the same photo on each of the height settings I was able to see as I clicked through them that one setting was getting a slightly clearer image. so...I'd check that out for the best possible result. ============ ORIGINAL below: I got this to scan all the family photographs and slides from WAY back. First I got the Canon 9000 but returned it when I noticed a red fuzzy line that went through all the photos that were scanned on the left side of the scanner bed. Someone else had the same problem so I just figured I'd spend the extra money and get the Epson since I only want to do this project ONCE. Also, the interface software with the Canon seemed kind of clunky. At this point....I am about 1600 photos and slides into the project with the V800 (lots more to go) and so far I really like this scanner. NO problems yet.....basically zero warm up time, lots of options for cleaning up the photos as it scans them if you want. I have not used much of that. I prefer to adjust the color and levels myself. However, when I did let it do some of that automatically, the results were totally acceptable. Some people say the slide holder seems flimsy but I have put hundreds of slides in and out of it and it's holding up great. I can see that maybe if you were a little too quick pulling the slides out at too great an angle, the little "tines" that hold the slides in COULD conceivably break off. But I don't feel like it's going to break with "normal" use. I only had one issue when I was loading the software initially. For some reason it would not load up the link to the online manual. It's the last thing to load on install....and it just would not do it. So I just had it skip that step and then everything worked fine. Time-wise....It's about a minute per slide (at 4800 dpi no "ICE" or clean up) And roughly the same for photos at 1200 dpi (no ICE etc) For slides, you put 12 in the holder and it does a quick preview scan, shows them all in a column and then lets you go through each one to flip or rotate or apply any one of a number of processes on each one individually. Seemed pretty handy. One other thing....it only seems to want to go up to 999 scans in one folder. From there I had to put a different "prefix" on the names so that it would save the file in the same folder as all the other ones without writing over something. I can't remember if it DID write over something or just not save the file out since there was a naming conflict....but something weird happened when it came back around after 999 and I had to put a different prefix on the naming to continue. There are more features on this thing that I have not even touched yet. But so far (1600 photos and slides in) I really like it. Seems faithful to the photo colors too.