Epson Perfection 640U review

Gallery

Verdict:

Narrowly fails to live up to its ambitious name. Beautiful scans appear at lightning speed.

Review Date: 1 Feb 2001

Price when reviewed: (£106)

Our Rating 6 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

It may be asking for trouble to call a product 'Perfection', but in Epson's case it's not far off.

This scanner's minimal good looks are matched with particularly sturdy construction, albeit in the usual moulded plastic.

A trio of front panel buttons provide short cuts to photo editing, OCR and e-mail software, via its excellent driver.

In its simplest mode, the Epson will perform the whole scanning process without you batting an eyelid. It'll recognise an image type, choose sensible settings, frame it correctly and send it to the desired location. What's more, it does all this at blindingly high speed. Our test scan took just 37 seconds, with previews in a staggering 5 seconds!

Clicking 'manual' gives you the usual set of controls, and unlike some drivers, its auto-exposure function works a treat, fully justifying its 36-bit colour depth. If anything, photos appear too vibrant, but this hardly feels like a failing. At 2,400dpi, the 600dpi vertical resolution becomes unstuck, producing long oblong blocks that the interpolation is struggling to correct, though at 1,200dpi it's barely visible. In fact, the transparency text scan even detected the subtle swirly interference patterns over the white areas, caused by multiple reflections.

In general this is a top-quality piece of kit at a remarkably good price. Speed is definitely its star quality, and combined with its one-touch abilities, it's a great choice for doing large amounts of OCR. Only slight image quality niggles keep it from the top spot.

Author: Ben Pitt

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