I get a lot of use out of scanners. Besides copying documents to my files or for emailing, I also have years’ worth of physical photos (not to mention slides) that I would love to have backed up and printed into albums I could share with other family members.
I also found my scanner useful when I got an assignment to illustrate my book about the Silk Road. The illos had to be delivered in digital form, and I was at a loss. Then my husband suggested scanning in my rough drawings and enhancing them in PhotoShop. As a quick-and-dirty way to create digital art, it worked great!
Sadly, the 10-year-old scanner we had been using died not long ago, and our other all-in-one printers simply didn’t have the resolution I needed if I ever got another illustration gig. So when Epson offered me a chance to try out their new Perfection V370 Photo Scanner, I immediately said, yes, please. While this dedicated flatbed scanner does take up a bit of room on my desk, it more than makes up for it in versatility and quality.
The Epson V370 turns documents into PDFs, just like any other scanner, and also comes with OCR software to create editable text. It also allows you to scan directly to the Cloud applications like Google Drive and Evernote.
For photos, the V370 can scan at up to 4800 dpi (although to try it out, I had to select just a small portion of the 4X6 photo I was scanning, as I kept getting an error message that the file was too big). It goes well beyond the resolution needed for book illustration purposes, which is 1200 dpi.
A sample photo (from my son’s pizza party invitation) scanned in at 2400 dpi on the Epson V370. Image: Kathy Ceceri
I like that the Epson comes with a frame to hold slides or negatives for scanning (as in the video above). And the cover swings back completely to make it easy to scan books or other bulky objects. You get a choice of four different modes, from Auto to Professional, and each allows you to select Backlight Correction and Dust Removal, which occurs while you’re scanning.
Figuring out all the features may take a little digging through the manual, which comes as an HTML file on the provided disks. I could not get mine to open for some reason, but I was able to download it from the Epson website.
For around $100, the Epson Perfection V370 Photo Scanner does a lot. I know it fulfills all my needs and then some. Find it on the Epson website, at Staples, and at Amazon.
