EPSON PERFECTION 4990 REVIEW

The breadth of scanning medium supported by the 4990 is impressive: slide film, negative film, medium format, A4 paper. There is a tendency to expect that a "jack of all trades" scanner will not be very good but that is not the case here.

In terms of quality, the real test for a scanner is how it handles slide/negative film since that is such a small area. However, the A4 scanning ability is faultless in my view - crisp, relatively fast and does exactly what I would have expected. Software provided with the scanner allows you to photocopy a multi-page document, particularly useful if you have a PDF print driver as it means you can produce a multi-page scanned document in one go.

That said, if you are looking for just A4 scanning then this is probably a bit over-the-top for your needs - it is really as a multi-purpose scanner that the Epson delivers. The slide scanner supports 8 slides being scanned at once using a stencil which is placed on the scanning plate - this is in my view rather poorly designed as once scanned it is actually quite tricky to remove the slides from the scanning plate. No such problems with the negative scanning, where 24 negatives are scanned at once using a stencil with slots for rows of up to 6 negatives. Once the stencil is removed the negatives come off with it.

As expected there is a preview and then a scan feature with all the expected functionality. For negatives, the colours are inverted on preview making it easy to see what you have scanned. The preview feature also works out where the photos it is scanning are located on the scanning plate and gets it right nearly all the time. It does struggle a bit on night shots or indoor evening shots where the background is dark (on one occasion it was convinced one slide I was scanning was in fact two photos; the only way round this was to manually select the frame from the overall scan, not a big problem).

DigitalICE for high quality dust removal, unsharp mask, level management, contrast/brightness configuration are all included although I was a little disappointed by the exposure management - there is an auto-exposure facility which is good, but I found that for dark photos it underexposes a lot which is difficult to counter with the other controls available

The 4800dpi scanning facility is a useful feature, good if you are looking to print to beyond A4, although I've tended to use 2400dpi and find this gives fine results up to A4. Likewise support for 48-bit colour is included but I've found 24-bit to be adequate.

The slide scanning is not fast, but then you would not expect it to be - it is comparable if not slightly faster than equivalent slide scanners I have used, and provides a similar level of result in my view (apart from the issue about exposure compensation).

So to conclude: this is a very good multi-purpose scanner - I was disappointed by the slide tray making it awkward to remove the slides, and the results on dark photos can be difficult to predict, but generally the results are superb and being an all-in-one scanner I would say it's very good value for money. When choosing which scanner you buy (the Epson range is broad) I would recommend not to be oversold on the high resolution and colour levels supported, as you must ask yourself whether these are needed. However, I would recommend DigitalICE as essential for slide scanning.