Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Scanner

I have the same problem another user reported with Epson Scan. They succeeded in reaching Epson who said the software has a memory management defect. In my case, my machine has Gigabytes of memory and hundreds of megabytes of free hard disk. The Epson software will not even let me do a Grey scale scan of an 8.5x11 photograph at 1200 dpi. It says I'm out of memory. However I'm looking at my memory allocation when I do this and I have Gigabytes of free memory when this error comes up. I have the latest Epson Scan software and am having this problem. Great hardware, but software is not as good as what I expected or needed.

After checking in Consumer Reports, I decided I would try this scanner. It is more than I expected. Had a few problems figuring out file scanning but their Help Desk quickly helped me understand. Would buy again and this is a great price - the price was higher in Consumer Reports and that was the only thing they didn't like but the price on Amazon brought it down to the level that made it a great buy!

Different templates allow scanning all different types of items. Great quality easy to use

To date this unit has been used primarily on old black and white 120 negatives. Results have been good to excellent in most cases, but in some instances dark areas will exhibit poor definition and show up as undefined black patches on the displayed image and is impossible to correct.

The other problem found was with ease of access to the copy function. Previous models of Epson scanners have been controlled by software such as Epson Smart Panel which creates a location from which all functions are easily reached. In this instance the 4490 is a step backward.

I have had this scanner in my possession for several weeks now and have scanned over 100 images. I have scanned printed media so my comments are limited to those types of scans only. I have been impressed both with the quality of the scans and the relative ease with which scanning has been accomplished. Because I own a dedicated 35mm film scanner, I do not contemplate scanning that size film but I will be scanning medium format negatives at some time in the distant future. I have had no mechanical or noise related issues with my scanner. Scan rates are not exactly blazingly fast, but I have been performing high quality scans so scan times have been acceptable for me. The build quality seems to be good and I would expect the unit to hold up to the moderate amount of use I have planned. By the way, the scanner is not petite so keep that in mind if size is a consideration. I have the scanner hooked up to a MacBook Intel computer running OS 10.4 so I do not know how this scanner will perform with the latest Mac OS.