Epson’s Perfection V550 Photo Color Scanner

If you’re in the market for a photo scanner the Epson Perfection V550 Photo Color Scanner is a fine little scanner in its own right, even if Epson neglected to include image-editing software.

Design and Features

A replacement for Epson’s ever-popular Perfection V500, the Perfection V550 has a scan area of 8.5x11.7 inches and a maximum optical resolution of 6,400 dots per inch, or dpi — decent for a $200 scanner. It measures 11.2 inches across, 19.1 inches from front to back, and it stands about 4.6 inches high but requires plenty of room overhead for opening the scanner lid.

The V550 comes with an adaptor that allows you to scan up to four 35mm slides, two rows of six negatives, and certain types of film. It can also scan multiple photos simultaneously, using the built-in auto edge detection to determine each image’s size, crop it, and then save each image as a separate file.

This Perfection model includes Digital Ice, a hardware-based routine for removing dust and scratches that works impressively well on certain types of image damage. It also includes a software-based dust filter for prints. Between the two, you can get rid of many kinds of blemishes on your scans.

Like a few of Epson’s latest scanners, this one uses LED (light-emitting diodes) instead of cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) that some scanners use. LED-based mechanisms eliminate the need to warm up the scanner before it can perform optimally.

Finally, as Epson has done with a few of its lower-end scanners, this one has four scan buttons on the front edge of the scanner, or scan modes, which start when you press one of them. The buttons are PDF or Portable Document Format; Copy, which sends the scan to a printer, Email, and Start, which displays the scan in Preview mode.

Software

As mentioned, while the V550 is a photo scanner, this model doesn’t come with image-editing software, per se. But it does come with Epson Scan with Epson Easy Photo Fix technology, plus Epson Easy Photo Print — plus an optical character recognition (OCR) program, Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint, for converting scanned text into editable text. My experience with all of Abbyy FineReader products is that they all perform accurate character recognition, with very few errors.

Furthermore, the Epson Scan utility lets you send your scans to Facebook and a few other photo-sharing sites, as well as your hard drive and several other locations.

The Budget Pro

When it comes to photo scanners, the V550 is undoubtedly borderline professional. It turned in perfect (or near-perfect) scans on nearly all of my tests, and the Digital Ice dust and scratches filters were impressive. If nothing else, the V550 scanned very well.

Still, it has no automatic document feeder, or ADF (but you shouldn’t expect one at this price), for scanning multiple pages, which makes it less than ideal for scanning multipage text documents, but for the price, it’s a great photo scanner. Period.