Epson's latest A4 flatbed scanner is targeted at amateur photographers and home photo enthusiasts. The scanner sits towards the top end of Epson's Perfection line and offers an impressive optical resolution of 4800x4800ppi. It also comes with three clip-on adapters for scanning negative strips, slides, and medium-format transparencies, and supports an optional multi-photo feeder and ADF for batch scanning. As with all new Epson scanners, the Perfection 4180 Photo also includes colour restoration software to help restore faded photos and film, as well as dust removal functions that remove 'dust' and scratches from scans. Quality is key though, and the Perfection 4180 Photo doesn't disappoint. It's very slow when scanning at its highest settings, but you'll be hard pushed to find such a capable scanner for under £200.

Pros: Excellent scans; transparency adapter; optional ADF
Cons: Big and bulky; no FireWire port; no NIC; slow high-res scans


Epson's Perfection 4180 Photo (Best Current Price: £128) is a consumer-level, medium-format scanner pitched at advanced amateur photographers. Sitting at the top end of Epson's Perfection series, the flatbed unit includes an optical resolution of 4800x4800ppi (4800x9600ppi maximum), 48-bit colour, a 3.4DMax for transparencies, and a built-in transparency unit for scanning 35mm negatives.

Installing the scanner and its supplied software is a breeze. Similar to other Epson scanners, once you've connected the scanner to your PC, Mac or laptop using the supplied USB 2.0 cable, all you have to do is install the driver software and the bundled utilities. Unfortunately, there's no built-in NIC for installing the scanner on a network, but this isn't really surprising considering the unit is designed primarily for home users.

Thankfully, you can customise the software installation by selecting only the programs that you want to install, which helps to save time and hard disk space. There's a transportation lock at the rear of the scanner too, which has to be released so the scanner can operate. There's no paper-based user guide though, so you'll have to install the browser-based reference guide if you encounter any problems. Epson does provide both a power adapter and USB cable though, so you're ready to start scanning straight from the box.

The Perfection 4180 Photo provides useful features that make achieving excellent results quick and easy. An example of this is are the four dedicated buttons on the front of the scanner that let you scan a document to your computer, scan and save a document, scan and then e-mail a file, or copy a document (printer needed). The supplied TWAIN-compliant driver software also supports multiple-document auto detection, multiple-document auto cropping, automatic skew correction, multiple marquee, and film scanning thumbnail previews.

The scanner is based on a CCD photoelectric device and can scan images up to an optical resolution of 4800x4800ppi, unlike the Perfection 2480 Photo which offers an optical resolution of 2400x4800ppi. The maximum document size it can handle is 216x297mm, which is good enough for creating prints up to A3 in size. It connects to a computer using either Full Speed USB 2.0 (12Mbit/s) or Hi-Speed USB 2.0 (480Mbit/s). There's no optional automatic document feeder for high-volume scans, but Epson does offer an optional multi-photo feeder for scanning up to 24 photos (10x15in.) automatically and an ADF for batch scanning up to 30 A4 documents.

If all you want to do is transfer a paper-based document onto your computer in digital format, you simply place the document face-down onto the scanner's platten and press the 'Scan' button. For thick or large documents you can remove the document cover to make it easier to align the document. The Perfection 4180 Photo's driver software then automatically previews the images and recognises the document source and type. The software then opens on your computer and allows you to select further options, such as the file format you want to save the file. It also allows you to scan images in colour, greyscale, or black-and-white.

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