In autumn 2007 Epson put the Perfection V500 Photo on the market, a low-priced flatbed scanner with an integrated transparency adapter. According to manufacturer data the scanner provides professional quality thanks to white LED light.

The Bottom Line The Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner does a great job at scanning photos and negatives. It comes with some good graphics-editing software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and ABBY Fine Reader for OCR.

Can handle negatives and slides; Great color restoration and dust removal; Software bundle includes Adobe Photoshop Elements

Light on instruction material; Large footprint

With the rise in popularity of multi-function printer/scanner/fax devices over the last few years, the standalone desktop scanner might seem to be an endangered species, especially around the office. Don't be fooled.

With all the attention currently going to 32 bit processors with 64-bit extensions, such as the Intel Xeon Woodcrest and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, it feels like the Intel Itanium has been given the cold shoulder.

Doing my Internet searches found the Epson Perfection V500 at a best price of £176.99 including free delivery from the first link below.

Easily one of the best photo scanners in its price range, especially for film owners

Easy to use; excellent scan results; removable transparency unit; dust and scratch removal; optional ADF

Light on business scanning; no Ethernet

This is a flatbed scanner with the facility for scanning film material as well as print pages. Epson says that this scanner is the first in the world to use "a CCD (Charge–Coupled Device) scanner using LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology.

This is the first dual purpose flatbed/film scanner from which we have taken respectable film scans; In fact we were surprised by the quality of reproduction from all media; We tried colour transparencies, black and white negatives and medium format negatives with uniformly excellent results.

This is quite a complicated piece of machinery and not at all intuitive in setup and operation; so why not provide a printed user's manual? It is a pain to have to have the scanner software open on the computer while at the same time trying to find the necessary instructions in an HTML document on...

For photographers looking for a serious scanner to help bring their old prints and negatives into the digital age, then the Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner is a fantastic option. It's aimed at the enthusiast who is after quality, without the professional price tag and at £199; you get quality in...

Does exactly what I want, need. Haven''t tried the slide/film scanning yet but don''t have many slides left from the ''60''s! Speedy, easy web site!

Very quiet; lid easily stays partially open but well out of the way; super DPI range; immediately recognized and connected to OS X; quick ''warm up''; great controls for pre-scan improvements

Would be nice if it could be shared on the network

I got this right after Xmas, mainly for scanning negatives. So far they have all come out great. If the negative is a little bowed, put the 'crown' up, if you don't, you will get some distortion in the image. Make sure to select the size you want prior to finalizing the scan.

Easy to use; one button operation

No negative feeder; a little slow