Rick’s Rants and Raves

Anne and I recently received an Epson Perfection V500 scanner as an early Christmas present. The main attraction of the scanner (since we already have one built into our HP C6180) was its ability to scan slides and negatives.

When we have the time, it does an excellent job. The problem is that in this world of instant gratification, it takes upwards of 2-3 minutes to make a low-quality-just-barely-fit-for-a-4×6-print scan. To take a high quality scan capable of producing an 8×10 requires 10+ minutes of scan time. Even if I were to just scan barely-better-than-thumbnails for a contact sheet it still takes more than a minute each. And we can’t just stuff it full of negatives and walk off–a typical load will get no more than 8-10 pictures. So, load it up and come back 15 minutes later.

This is probably no worse than any other consumer grade scanner, but josh darn it, with nearly instant everything else in our lives, it ought to be able to snap-snap-snap capture the negatives so fast that we can’t keep up with it. Oh well.