Real-world solutions so you can rest easy.Quickly scan stacks of business cards or 4" x 6" photos. With the Epson Perfection® 2480 Limited Edition, it's easy to scan and organize important documents and snapshots, as well as slides and negatives. 2400 x 4800 dpi resolution offers consistently brilliant results. And, the included Multi Photo/Business Card Feeder makes scanning and organizing all your business cards and 4" x 6" photos a snap!
User-friendly software means anyone can work more efficiently and still achieve remarkable results. In fact, the Epson Perfection 2480 Limited Edition even includes Epson Easy Photo Fix™ for one-touch color restoration of faded photos, slides and negatives. And, this powerful performer speeds through every task thanks to Hi-Speed USB 2.0.
Features:- Scan and organize stacks of business cards, or photos up to 4" x 6"
- Enjoy high-quality scans for brilliant reprints and enlargements
- Get more done with easy-to-use organizational software
- Restore faded color photos with just one touch
- Scan slides and film strips with ease
- Quickly scan photos and important documents with Hi-Speed USB 2.0
1 Excellent and Versatile
Over the past 5 years, I have been scanning the family's photos. This involved a very manual process of laying out the pics on the scanner (an older epson), and then marking off the prints and scanning them.
I've been looking for an automatic scanner since I began - one with a photo sheet feeder. I've considered a few, but the reviews all seemed to indicate jamming problems.
When I saw this one for $169, I gave it a shot.
It works incredibly well. The photo feeder will pull in up to 24 pics, scan and eject them. You can define the folders and the scan quality for the process. With photos that are in good condition, I have not had a single jam - very impressive.
A number of photos I have were in albums, and after removing them are curled. The feeder did take these in too, but with occassional jamming.
The automatic feeder in general though is very impressive.
The process is not fast - probably about a minute per print. So this is not something to sit and wait for. Do something else and then come back to add prints, or set it up to do a stack at night.
The scan qualities are very good. Color and sharpness are fine. The quality of the scan is dependent on the quality of the original of course, so expectations can't be too high for pics taken 30 yrs ago on 126 cartridge film. (Remember that?)
I've also scanned using the flat bed - this works very well too. If you put multiple prints on the glass, and separate them with some space, the software will recognize them and scan them in as separate images.
Slide scans are very good - but only 2 at a time.
One note - the sheet feeder is an entirely separate cover for the scanner. To switch between flat bed scanning and sheet feeder, you have to switch these covers. Very simple to do though, and not an issue.
Altogether, this is very versatile, with good scan quality and I highly recommend it.
2 Awesome product
The automatic photo feeding capability of this scanner makes scanning lots of prints very easy. I bought the scanner two days ago and have scanned in 360 4x6 pics with very little problem. Out of the 360 pics I had no jams, and a few pics that did not scan correctly (mostly this meant that the pic was cropped in some way during the scanning process). Over all I am very pleased with the scanning quaility and speed of this scanner. Epson does warn you about scanning valuable originals as apparently there is a chance for the photo to scratched as it goes through the automatic feeder. I did not experience that problem.
Software is ok. Much better than what comes with the HP Scanjet 4070 and the software was much easier to install.
Do follow the directions that one of the other ppl posted about scanning in pics as a tiff and then using a program to rotate and convert them to jpeg. I used Picasa (free from Google) and it worked fine.
3 A good scanner with the unique feeder feature
Cropping issues: Any time you manually place a photo on the glass of a scanner, your placement is likely to be rotated slightly. My Canon LIDE 20 software addresses this conservatively, cropping none of the photo, sometimes resulting in a thin wedge of white at the edges. (To remove this, you need to crop it in a photo editor, or re-scan with correct alignment.) This may be the correct implementation for a platen-only scanner, but it can be disappointing when scanning in quantity. Accordingly, the Epson software crops all edges slightly, up to 0.1 inch, in "Full Auto Mode". Also, my test scans on the glass were cropped 0.2 inch (from the 4x6 original) on the edge that I had butted against the front edge of the glass. Butting against an edge is usual, to help get the angle right. Butting against the left edge instead, increased crop on that butted edge to 0.2 inch. My Canon scanner does not have this problem. The Epson 2480 scanner would probably not be my choice, except for the feeder. The crop may be a little less on feeder scans, and does not suffer from a bad edge.
Comparing TIFFs at 600 dpi on screen: I cropped a section out of some scans, and compared them, as well as the originals. The Canon, Epson (glass) and Epson (feeder) scans were all noticeably different. The Epson scans appear square - no noticeable difference depending on orientation of the scan, when then rotated to be the same for display. The scans from the Canon appear to be slightly out of square, but this could be a problem due to the age of the scanner. The Canon scans are softer and brighter, generally having more accurate color on screen, on my test photo. (Auto-levels in PhotoShop Elements 3 made the Epson scans at least as good, on screen.) To me, the Epson (glass) scans were very slightly better than the Epson (feeder) scans, in image quality (colors were the same). In "Full Auto Mode", you don't get to tweak any options that might brighten the images, etc. (It is worth noting that I cannot calibrate my LCD display - your mileage may vary.)
Lower resolution: Epson scans at 400dpi or Canon at 300dpi are perfectly acceptable on screen, hardly distinguishable from 600dpi. Scans of 4x6 prints will never be any better than the print. If you want an 8x12 of comparable quality, you need to go to the negative/slide, a medium that's meant to be enlarged. The negative/slide scanner is suitable only for occasional use, due to lack of Digital ICE. Get your compressed air ready, to clean those things before scanning - and re-scanning! Dust on the negative is a major issue. The quality of the scans is very good.
Print comparison: I usually use a web print service, but I did not have time to wait. On my Canon i950, I printed (1) Canon 600 dpi, (2) Epson feeder 400 dpi, (3) glass 600, (4) feeder 600, (5) feeder 600 with partial auto-levels from PSE. [All were on Canon Photo Paper Pro - I had to re-do two I had done on Plus paper, which was substantially inferior in color.] The only print that we judged acceptable [close enough to the original] was (4) Epson feeder at 600dpi. The others all were inferior in cropping, sharpness, and/or color. The Canon scan had brighter colors than the original, and was a little less sharp. The major cropping of the Epson platen scan, exacerbated by the Canon printing software, resulted in prints that looked less sharp than the feeder print, probably due to stretching to 4x6. The 400 dpi feeder scan was slightly less sharp than at 600dpi, but otherwise the same. We expect better print quality, with a professional print service. [All scans for this test, Full Auto].
Other: "Always use the document table to scan important, valuable, or one-of-a-kind photos.... Dust, friction, or a feed jam may cause damage to the photo... if you load it in the feeder." My test print did eventually get scratched. There is no power switch - you will have to plug and unplug it. (The Canon is USB-powered, making this a non-issue.) When buying a scanner, be willing to pay a little more for a decent return policy - I bought mine at Amazon - they're great!
The Home mode appears useless. In Professional mode, scans require manual cropping, which is relatively easy at scan time. This eliminates the over-cropping problem, at the cost of quite a bit of time. No cropping was needed next to the edge of the glass, indicating a dead space there, though I forgot to check.
Important issue: 4x6 prints are inserted into the feeder 4-inch side first. This results in portrait orientation scans. Landscape (horizontal) scans need attention, to see them sensibly on the computer. Windows XP will rotate these for you, with the click of your mouse. However, if you scan JPEGs, this is a lossy rotation - every time you save a JPEG, you lose something. The compromise proposed by Chris Breeze is to scan TIFFs, rotate them (which is lossless), and then convert them to JPEGs.
I use BreezeBrowser Pro, which will perform lossless rotation of JPEGs. This works great for digicam images, where the image dimensions are usually an exact multiple of the 4/8/16-pixel tile size. However, batch scans from the Epson 2480LE (or most other scanners) do not have these perfect dimensions, so lossless rotation cannot work correctly. Here how I'm getting around this problem:
1. Insert the prints into the feeder face down.
2. Set the scanner to 400 or 600 dpi, for TIFFs, and scan the images to C:\My Pictures\Scans.
3. Fire up BB Pro, go to the Scans folder, highlight all the Landscapes (Ctrl-click as needed) and rotate them 90 degrees in the correct direction. (If the Portraits are 180 degrees off, rotate all pics once, and the Portraits again.)
4. Highlight all the pics. If they are in reverse order, use View - Image Order - Reverse Sort Order. Or, drag & drop as needed, to get the images in the desired order.
5. Use Tools - Batch Rename, As Displayed. I use yyyy-mm-ddd %n name, e.g. 2005-02-23 001 Neat Place.
6. Edit the TIFFs, as needed (select an image, then Ctrl-D, to fire up your configured image editor).
6. Ctrl-A to select all, then Tools - Proofs - Proof Selected, to convert all the images to JPEGs in the Scans\proofs folder (check no boxes). I chose to use 95/100, which resulted in files ranging from 650K to 1.5MB.
7. Delete all the TIFFs (one click) - I set BB Pro so that mine land in a Deleted folder, so I'll have to haul them away later (a real winner, on occasion).
8. Put the JPEGs where I want them....
Bottom line: We decided to keep this scanner. It was a close call, but we have thousands of prints to scan, and there does not seem to be any other affordable option. The Epson 2480LE is definitely at its best for this purpose.
4 Does the Job
Got it 2 days ago. Spent the first day playing around with all the settings specific to the feeder (ADF). Now 250 scans into its life I can recommend it just because of this feature. I've looked around for a long time for this kind of features on a scanner; including an obscure scanner called fotofunnel or the trouble ridden HP w/ADF...
anyway other details:
I couldn't get Vuescan to show it's Batch feature. So it's useless for this scanner, though it works for the regular scanning features (maybe it'll be updated soon :). Same thing with Silverfast or what ever its name is.
Out of 300 scans I've had 1 jam and 3 failure to feed (could'nt grab the photo but managed with a little help). The jam was simple; just open the lid and remove the photo that's on the glass and pull back the incoming photo about half an inch. In other words, I'm not too worried about it damaging my photos. One anoyance is that dust accumulates on the glass after a some 40 scans (more or less depending on how clean your pictures are). Good luck with your research. Got to go, about 3000 scans to go.
=======update======
Now on my 2000th scan I can add a few things.
-Some types of Black & White prints fail to feed. So I have to push each one an extra 1/4" for the feeder to grab it; after that all is well.
-You can keep on stacking as it scans but I chose not to do it b/c I'm concerned about overheating something. So I let it rest a minute or less.
-The feeder has a fan that is quite loud. I don't know what it's for but would guess it flattens the photograph to the scanner's glass.
-Warped photos WILL jam inside. Nothing serious, but it interrupts the flow. All of my 25+ year old photos have this problem because they were peeled off albums.
Ok, back to work...
5 Digital imaging made simplified!!!
I just bought this scanner, and have only used it a few times, but I'm already blown away by how easy this is to use! Since my first two kids were born before digital cameras, I have boxes of photos to "digitize". This is making very quick work of it. I like the fact that it even accomodates the older square photos from when I was a kid. It has a color restoration feature on it for these older photos, and so far, so good. It quickly and easily converts back to the standard flatbed for bigger photos. I would definetely recommend this to anyone with a large amount of hard copy photos they would like to preserve.
6 Wow! Great Photo Scanner!
I've tried scanning in all my hard copy photos over the years, but the process of doing so on a traditional flatbed scanner has made the process nearly unbearable.
It's about time that one of the big players released a scanner with auto-feed capability to scan photos effortlessly at a reasonable price.
The scanner itself produces very nice scans and is a compitent piece of hardware. The real gem however is the feeder lid which has made scanning my collection of photos a breeze. No jams, no damage to the photos, and no hassle. Just drop a batch of up to 25 photos in the feed mechanism and go have a snack while the scanner does all the work. The included software does everything you need it to do - adjust color, crop, rotate, or remove red-eye - all with an easy to use interface.
Only downsides were that the installation process was a bit messy (it does the job, but seems to be 4 software installation processes in one) and that the auto-feed mechanism can't accomodate 5x7's.
If you have a bunch of photo albums around and want to take your memories digital, this is the scanner for you.
7 Stacks and Stacks of Photographs Scanned...
I've scanned over 3,000 photographs with this scanner and its automatic feeder. At the highest resolution, it takes about 45-seconds to scan each photograph. It sucks it in, previews the image, scans the image, spits out the photograph, and sucks in another to start the process all over again. It will save each photograph with a file name you specify automatically - all you do is load a stack of photographs and walk away. The feeder will hold about 25 photographs at a time, but you can add more to it to keep it "full" for continuous feeding. I load it, walk away, and then come back later to place more photographs under the ones already in the stack. While it'll hold 25 photographs, I've successfully scanned over 150 by adding to the stack before it's completed its job. Since you don't have to continuously monitor this scanner it's amazing how fast a large stack of photographs will turn into digital images. I load it and about every 15 minutes I add to the stack. Besides the automatic feeder, it comes with a normal lid that you can switch between. The lid has a built-in light for scanning film and slides (I haven't used this feature yet). It also comes with a "stand" to store the lid or the automatic feeder when it's not attached to the scanner (you can see both in the photograph I posted here). If you have a lot of photographs laying around that you want to turn into digital images - this is the scanner for you. I'll post further information if I run across any problems.
