Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have a large collection of slides shot in the past 20 years. Lots of good shots on FujiChrome100 and Velvia50. In the past I've had a tough time getting good prints from them from regular photo labs, and pro printers cost too much. I have experience with an older Nikon slide scanner, and I am getting much better results from the Epson V700 bed scanner. I see image improvements to 6400dpi, I scan to tiff at 48bit using the Epson software, then adjust color and contrast in photoshop cs2. I get very good results even from some warped slides where I always had focus problems when printed in the lab. Its very exciting to see these pictures again. Despite good reviews of this feature, I have yet to find an acceptable result from the included automatic dust removal, both hardware and software based. The dust is gone, replaced by strange pixelation. Much better to remove the dust by hand using the CS2 repair tool, which works like magic for me. After dust removal I increase sharpness using smart sharpening, and save to jpg. Its amazing the detail that emerges with a little sharpening. Resultant jpg is 20-35megs, but is compatible with local printer's fuji frontier printer. With the control I get from manipulating and color-converting the digital image, I get prints that come 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 modern slide scanner because I've never used one, but the results I get are certainly better than I expected. It is surprising to me that these slide prints are on par with what I get from my nikon d70. Bed scanning of slides is pretty fast, about 45 minutes to scan 12 slides when scanning to my pentium m laptop. It take about a minute to put the old slides away and plop new ones into the holder. Installation was super easy. Just install driver, plug in, start scanning. But the documentation isn't so good. There is a lot involved in getting a good scan, its sort of an art. You'll need to read a bunch on the internet. When you first get the printer, play with all the settings, scan the same slide over and over with different slide-height settings, resolutions,etc, until you find what works for you. Have an idea what you want to see, then try stuff and see if you can make it happen. Like I said above, the auto dust removal might be convenient, but the results won't withstand close scrutiny. Ditto for the scanning software based "color restoration", "sharpening", or anything else. Just 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 use 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 huge difference. Some resultions will alias the print pattern. Getting a good scan from a print requires patience.