Product Reviews

Even if you already have a digital camera, the chances are that somewhere you'll have a huge pile of photo prints. Those prints won't last for ever - besides, it's a rare holiday snap that can't be improved by a little red-eye reduction. It's this market that Epson is addressing with its new Perfection 2480 Photo scanner, an A4 flatbed model with a transparency unit for scanning negative or slide film.

Finished in an attractive silver-grey, it's a compact device. It doesn't take up much more desk space than a piece of A4 paper. It's easy to operate, particularly in the excellent fully automatic mode. This detects the type of document you're scanning, sets a suitable resolution, and opens the perfectly cropped result for editing. Previews take just 8 seconds to appear, and an A4 original can be scanned at 300 dots per inch in 16 seconds - extremely fast. Scanned images are crisp and detailed, but in common

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with many scanners there is a slight colour bias - images are warmer than the original, with whites becoming slightly peachy. The scanner is also quite loud.

The tiny size of negatives and slides means you need to scan them at extremely high resolution to pick out the detail adequately for enlargements. Usually high resolution means expensive, but the Epson is one of the cheapest scanners around to scan at 2,400 dots per inch - plenty for all but the most demanding purposes. At this scale, hairs and dust take on B-movie monster proportions, but a dust-removal option does an good job of removing these blemishes. At 2,400dpi, capturing a single frame takes just over a minute - speedy for this level of detail.

Other than its automatic setting, the driver has two modes that provide 'Simple' or 'Advanced' control over scanning, but it never quite takes a back seat. Attempting to scan some slide film with a bright subject and dark background, it pre-cropped the previewed frame to remove outlying dark areas. This couldn't be overridden. Worse still, when scanning a strip of film containing dark sunset scenes such as you might shoot on holiday, it refused to preview some frames. It had decided they were too dark - but in advanced mode, the final decision should always be down to the user.

The 2480 is an excellent piece of hardware at a decent price, but it's infuriating to see a good picture ignored because the driver doesn't like it. For this reason, the 2480 misses out on an award.