Part Two:
The document scanner I bought is the Epson DS-410, an apparently discontinued product that was their bottom end as far as document scanners go – it’s less than half the speed of their photo scanning, sheet-fed flagship, but more important to me, it was a third of the cost. Not having used any of the Very many other brands & models of document scanners available, I can’t begin to give any sort of comparison. The people who get paid to review these things concentrate on speed & things like OCR accuracy – I didn’t find one review of any document scanner that even touched on photo scan quality. What I can do is talk about my experiences with the DS-410 so far – many, maybe even most of the things I’ll talk about will apply to other brands & models, at least to some degree.
Document [sheetfed] scanners are designed for documents, to be used in an office environment turning large amounts of paper into digital files. For those files to be useful, usually OCR [Optical Character Recognition] is involved, and for OCR to work at its best, text must be clear & sharp, not fuzzy. The software that comes with document scanners, and to some extent the electronics of the scanners themselves, is designed to maximize sharp, clear text. That has an impact on what scanned photos look like – Epson’s highest end FF-680W is tuned more for photos, and reviews say its OCR capabilities suffer quite a bit, I assume for that reason.
The DS-410’s Twain driver software, which includes the scanner’s interface & controls, applies a sharpening effect to anything you scan. That Twain driver GUI or interface is what you’ll see if you run the included Scan 2 app, or most often when you use the scanner from inside a photo or office type app. At the same time it’s sharpening your scans however, it’s also shifting the very lightest & darkest colors to white & black respectively, I assume to make text clearly stand out. It shows up most as a loss of shadow detail, and can be mostly compensated for by changing the gamma, Brightness, & Contrast settings. There’s also a WIA [Windows Imaging Architecture] driver, that’s not as advanced as the Twain version, but works in or with more apps, including the minimalist Windows Scan and Fax & Scan apps.
The WIA driver doesn’t perform the sharpening or dynamic range changes like the Twain driver does, but neither does it use anything like the Twain driver’s GUI, which causes a couple of issues. The main problem I had was that using the Twain driver the scanner can autodetect the size of the photo it’s scanning, which the WIA driver cannot. There are many standard paper, postcard etc. sizes listed, but when I chose the one closest to the prints I was scanning, that’s not what I got at all – I got the photo at the top, and 2 times that below as white space, which should have been an inch at most according to the size I selected. It was/is workable, there’s a chance I could figure out how to add or edit one of the paper size presets [though who knows if anything would work accurately], but in the end decided [at least for now] to stick with the Twain driver.
The DS-410, to its credit, does get the colors pretty much right when scanning photos. I’ve used many flatbed scanners since my 1st behemoth in the early 90s, including mid-range stand-alone photo & negative scanners, & those on some top model all-in-one printers, and they’ve almost never matched the colors in the original photo print, even after going through a full calibration process to ensure color matching from scanner to monitor to printer. So, getting the colors mostly right is a very good thing. That’s one of the main reasons I’ve gone to photographing the old prints in my mom’s collection, so I can get right to work editing the photos to repair any damage, and make them better photos in general, rather than having to spend time 1st correcting colors.
Not having that big sheet of glass that flatbed scanners use has effects too… Flatbed scanners often have some, thankfully minor, focus issues, because production tolerances just aren’t that tight. They’re also prone to show a photo print’s surface details and imperfections, which can be more work to fix. The top surface of that glass is pretty easy to clean, but dust can get into the open space below it, may stick to the underside of the glass as well, and it can be pretty difficult to disassemble to clean. You can get flatbed scanners with much higher resolutions than the 600 dpi that every document scanner I looked at could manage. With document scanners a single piece of dust can mean a streak across the entire scanned image, and you have not only the glass over the sensor to clean, but a bunch of rollers too.
Using the DS-410 scanner I find it helps to wear disposable rubber-type gloves, to prevent fingerprints etc. handling photo prints, and it helps to wipe down each print before I set it in the feed tray. I did without both for a short time while tuning the software gamma settings & such, and wound up having to clean dust out of the scanner’s innards every dozen scans or so, vs. after a batch of a bit over 100. Since the ejected prints don’t stack well at all in the output tray, I quickly pick them up as soon as they come out of the scanner, roughly one per second. [I really need to figure out how to hang a basket on the end of the table to catch them without using the output tray at all.] And since it could ruin a bunch of scans if a piece or dust or dirt stuck to the glass over the sensor, I like to scan in batches of around a dozen, quickly checking the results before moving to the next batch [I wouldn’t mind having to re-scan the entire dozen if it came to that, but I definitely would mind having to rescan a stack of 50].
The stuff in that last paragraph is what makes me somewhat certain that Epson’s high end Fast Foto scanner is designed more for potential marketing hype, and the higher price they hope to get for it, than for any practical considerations. It seems that Epson’s been pushing a lot of writers to review the device, and it seems that most people aren’t getting fooled – the MSRP for the Fast Foto is $600, last week it was marked down to $550, & today it’s down to $525. I could see having a [much] faster scanner if I was doing a stack of regular paper documents, but the slower speed of the DS-410 is about right for photos I think. I could do with the Fast Foto being tuned for photos, but that’s not worth $325 - $400 to me. The same for the Fast Foto software that can do some basic image corrections – so can loads of other batch image editing software.
Wrapping things up… To me buying the Epson DS-410 was definitely worth it, but Only for its speed, and because I’ve come to doubt that I’ll ever get to the boxes of old photos any other way. For the same money I paid [~$200] I could have gotten a flatbed scanner with more features & triple the resolution, but it wouldn’t have cured the problem I have with the scanner on my all-in-one printer – lift the lid, wipe off the photo, wipe off the glass if necessary, close the lid, do the scan, save the scan, and I’ve just spent several minutes. A flatbed scanner with an auto doc feeder [ADF] helps, but not that much, & I’ve had feed issues with photo prints.
I would have never thought of buying a document scanner had it not been for a half article, half review of the Fast Foto by Colin Smith [Photoshop Cafe], whom I greatly respect when it comes to Photoshop, Lightroom etc. In the same boat as me, with boxes of personal photos he thought he’d never get to, he found the quality was generally good enough – not pro quality good enough, but for personal photos he’d never get scanned otherwise, acceptable. That was/is the key, and after scanning a couple hundred prints, I agree with it – if I didn’t, I’d have returned the scanner. And yes, Epson’s hand in Smith’s article is obvious… IMHO the Wi-Fi capability is useless for example, and I’d never just stack my photos as-is, without wiping etc., nor would I skip my quality checks, nor would I disregard handling the ejected prints with care, & I’d have to skip all 3 to get more than a thousand photos scanned in one day, though I’ve no doubt it’s possible.
