Epson Perfection 2580 Photo review

Digital cameras have changed the way we take and share photos, but if you use a film camera it's easy to get left behind.

Standard flatbed scanners can digitise your prints, but a high-resolution model that can scan film will get more detail from the original negatives.

Loading film strips into special holders can be a fiddly business, unless you're using a device such as the 2580's automatic film loader. A hatch in the scanner's lid opens to reveal a nifty motorised feeder that will take a strip of between two and six negatives. You can also scan mounted slide film, or shorter negative strips, but you'll need to load them manually.

The driver has two preview modes, both of which take just 25 seconds to display a strip of six negatives. Thumbnail mode automatically identifies and crops individual images.

The scanner can capture images at up to 2,400 dots per inch (dpi). Scanning a single negative (35x24mm) at this resolution took just 53 seconds, and resulted in a digital image with roughly 3,300x2,400 pixels. This is ten times the information displayed on a 1,024x768 desktop - it's enough for a A3 enlargement.

Our test scans of negative film had colours which were slightly warm, but they were more accurate than most affordable scanners and could easily be corrected using driver options. The images had sharp details that suggested accurate focus, and there was plenty of contrast between shades in the darkest and lightest areas.

As a flatbed scanner, the 2580 is equally comfortable capturing paper and other reflective documents. It's fast, offering an A4 preview in just eight seconds. At 600dpi it scanned a standard 6x4in photo in 16 seconds, and at 300dpi an A4 document took 14.5 seconds. All produced images were sharp and colours were faithful.

The 2580's software bundle includes ArcSoft PhotoImpression for basic image editing, and ABBYY FineReader Sprint. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software recognises text in an image and converts it into an editable document. We scanned and converted a page of A4 type in 30 seconds and its text was identified accurately.

If you need to digitise your back collection of photographs, the 2580 will save you loads of time and deliver superb results, all at a reasonable price.

Author: Simon Handby