Epson Perfection V100 Photo review

It isn't going to win many beauty contests, but the silver and white Epson V100 beats every other scanner in this price bracket for image quality, and that's what counts.

Its optical resolution of 3,200 x 9,600dpi may not quite be the highest, but it's more than enough for almost all tasks, and realistically a product in this bracket isn't going to be accurate enough to benefit from any more nominal resolution.

At the front are four buttons for one-click scanning to email, printer, a photo editing application or direct to a PDF file. PDFs are good for sharing scanned documents via email, as the Adobe Reader application that displays them is free (www.adobe.com) and convenient for viewing documents. JPEG files generally make more sense for scanned photos.

As well as being able to scan reflective documents like photos and magazine pages, the V100 can also scan 35mm film. It's a little tricky to insert a strip of negatives into the plastic holder without smearing them with fingerprints, but the holder can also accept mounted slides.

The scanning software can automatically separate the individual negatives or slides into individual images scanned in one batch. This is also possible with multiple reflective documents - handy if you want to scan several small photos.

The software has an automatic mode where you can just click to make a scan. It detects the type of document you've loaded and scans it at predetermined settings (although you can alter these if you wish). You still need to remember to remove the cover from the transparency adapter to scan film.

When it comes to speed, the V100 proved no slouch in our tests. It scanned an A4 document in 15 seconds at 150dpi (similar quality to a photocopy) and managed a frame of 35mm film at 2,400dpi in a reasonable one minute and 12 seconds. There's no sacrifice in quality for this speed: colours were faithful to the originals and, while contrast needed to be slightly increased to make whites truly white, the resulting images were sharp.

At this price, the Perfection V100 is hard to fault, and great value.