Epson Perfection V700 photo scanner

Pros: Quick, Great resolution and color quality

Cons: SIlverfast SW is useless and Epson Scan is badly buggy

Summary: I've had this scanner for about a month now, I got it to digitize years worth of 35MM film negatives.

I have the scanner connected to a Windows XP SP2, AMD 64 3800+ CPU with 2 GIG of memory and a 560Gig NVidia RAID5 array. I am running the version of Epson Scan and drivers currently on the Epson website. I've scanned about 1200 individial pictures so far.

The scanner itself is great and the quality I get out of it is all I could have expected. While 800 speed film results in grainy pictures, I've done some 100 speed film taken in good light that results in some stunning digital images.

As I have read notes other places (and I agree) that the film holders are flimsy, but they haven't failed me yet.

The scanning software is the core of my problems. Epson includes Silverfast AI, but as far as I can tell, that will only scan one image at a time (even if you load up 10 images in the film holder...) so I dropped that.

Epson scan works well but I have noted a few serious bugs...

- When you scan past 1000 images in one folder it will begin writing over 001, 002, 003 and not warn you. I lost 30 pictures this way.

- The application crashes with a problem writing a TWAIN file. This problem gets progressivly worse the longer I run the application (i.e. the first pass it will scan 12 images in a batch with no failure, a few scans later it will fail after 7 pictures, then after 3 pictures, then after 1 picture). I end up having to reboot my computer 3 or 4 times while scanning to start the cycle over.

If I leave Epson soft running on the computer for a long time (like over night) it will lock the machine up and require a reset button...)

I like the device, but may have to go out and spend $100+ on scanning sw. Comments from other users are very welcome. I'vr reported all of thsi to Epson without a reply.