Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner

The scanner itself is fine and capable of creating good to great quality scans. The software that comes with it however is not very good.

Warning!!!!! Your USB connection may be insufficient for Epson scanners.
Epson Customer Support says:
"Some Dell PCs do not provide enough voltage from the USB ports to power some USB devices. To resolve this, you can purchase a powered USB hub to provide the USB devices with sufficient operating power. Such a hub will help the device operate correctly in the case of communication issues. This may happen on other Dell computers as well."

The scanner meets all my expectations. Tremendously pleased with its performance, speed and associated software. Far exceeds my previous scanner which I purchased five or six years ago.
Very cost effective when compared with higher priced scanners.
I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

I recently purchased this scanner to scan pics and negatives and some old 120 negatives from the 1950's and early 1960's. It has worked better than I could have imagined in converting those slides and negatives to images , I am seeing relatives that I had not thought of in years and found dozens of pictures of folks that had passed on that up to now had long since been lost. The experience thus far, while daunting with over 1200 photos and negatives to scan, at a few minutes each, has been very positive. This is a great scanner.

The Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner is everything it claims to be, but not much more. If you're scanning photographs or other graphic items, it gets the job done nicely, and it's reasonably quick about it. If you need to scan documents, it's not the way to go. It's too slow, and the software is not really optimized for text. It does a decent job on documents, but there's too many adjustments necessary, and it takes much longer than scanners designed specifically for documents. On the plus side, the software includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. That's a great freebie.