Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I needed a scanner mainly for scanning my old prints, negatives and slides. Initially I was going to buy a cheaper photo scanner (Epson 1250), but was disappointed by its poor quality. The 2450 has exceeded my expectations. From prints or negatives, it is producing superb quality scans, and it does it FAST. A few comments from my experience so far: - The scanner comes with an excellent bundle of software. TWAIN is a great product - very user friendly UI for all types of scans (scan to file, print, email, post to the Web). Not too happy with SilverFast though (bad UI and unstable). Photoshop Elements, although a learning curve is needed, is excellent photo editing tool. - Unless you have to print a HiRes photo over 8x10's, use 300dpi: you'll get the same results as higher resolutions, and is much faster (scanning a color print at 300dpi is ~30sec, compared to over 5min at 1600dpi. - If you scan at 1600dpi/48bit, be prepared for huge amount of computer resources for processing the image, both by TWAIN and Photoshop. I have a 2.2GHz P4, 1GB memory, and when I tried to scan a large photo at 1600dpi, about 500MB of memory was used (good thing TWAIN displays how much mem is needed prior to the scan). Photoshop's performance was also degraded. - After some experimentation, I'm getting best results by making some pre-scan enhancements via TWAIN (mainly Gamma & Color adjustments), and add final touches with Photoshop. Assuming you have the time to spend, this will be a fun thing to do, and will feel great when you see that with a decent photo printer you can produce better photos than your originals! - The scanner works fine with XP. Its drivers are not certified by Microsoft for XP, (which means you have to manually install the drivers that come with the scanner), but so far I had no problems. I think this is one of the best buys I made. The only concern I can think of, is its size compared to other scanners (shouldn't be a problem to most of you, unless you live in an apartment in Manhattan as I do...). You can get a scanner at half price or less, but if you need to digitize your photos and slides, this is the way to go.