I have scanned in excess of 3000 slides in the past two years; some of the slides are as old as 60 years. The quality of the slides have ranged from excellent to downright color-shifted. I've been using the manual (professional) mode and adjusting color balance and cleaning up.

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.

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...

Epson America recently started shipping the Perfection V500 Photo, its newest flatbed/film scanner. At a street price of around $250, this scanner is the first in its price range to feature a LED light source instead of a traditional fluorescent lamp.