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Epson's Perfection 4490 Photo provides the tools you need to quickly digitise, restore and renew photos at an affordable price. The scanner is ideal for advanced amateur photographers or photo enthusiasts as it includes a convenient film holder that allows for batch scanning of 35mm slides, negatives and 2.25-inch film. It's wasted on general scanning duties, but home and small-business users looking to make high-quality print copies and experienced photographers seeking a versatile archiving solution should be well served.

Pros: Good quality; scans film & slides; removes dust & scratches
Cons: Disappointing dynamic range; expensive ADF

Epson's newest consumer scanner, the Perfection 4490 Photo (Best Current Price: £145), is a versatile scanner that offers pretty much everything you need to restore photos, negatives and slides, as well as completing other tasks and projects with relative simplicity. The CCD-based flatbed scanner, which uses a white cold cathode fluorescent lamp as a light source, also allows you to scan and save all of your 35mm and medium format film as photographic images, so it should also appeal to traditional film photographers.

The USB 2.0 scanner (272x475x113mm, 4kg) comes with a high 48-bit optical scan resolution of 4800x9600ppi (pixels-per-inch) and 3.4Dmax brightness, which is actually better than some dedicated film scanners. It also includes Epson's Digital ICE technology for removing scratches and dust from negatives and slides, as well as the company's third generation Easy Photo Fix technology for one-touch colour restoration of faded photos, slides and negatives. Adding nicely to the well-rounded package are convenient front panel buttons that allow you to automatically scan for copies and e-mail attachments, as well as generate PDF files.

The scanner is ideal for advanced amateur photographers or photo enthusiasts and includes a convenient film holder that allows for batch scanning of 35mm slides, negatives and 2.25-inch film. The integrated Transparency Unit (TPU) supports up to twelve 35mm frames, four 35mm slides or one medium format film up to 6x12cm. The scanner even automatically detects whether the film is positive or negative, colour or black-and-white. You simply position the templates on the flatbed, place the film or slides in the template, and use the scan command.

Four buttons on the front of the scanner allow you to scan the image as a PDF, attach it in an e-mail or copy it by pressing just one button. Epson's bundled scan software also has the ability to automatically orientate your photographs or documents, even if it is not placed on the panel squarely. An Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) is an optional extra (£135 ex. VAT) and fits on top of the scanner, allowing you to scan up to 30 A4 sheets. The scanner also comes with Adobe's excellent Photoshop Elements 3.0 (image editor), ABBYY's FineReader Sprint Plus (OCR), NewSoft's Presto! BizCard (business card manager), as well as Epson's creativity suite of applications.

Performing a scan is achieved via three scan modes. There's a Full Auto Mode that takes away all confusing controls and settings, Home Mode which offers minimal control over settings, and a Professional Mode that gives you total control of scanning settings and lets you check their effects with a preview image. Professional Mode is best when you want to preview your image and make extensive, detailed corrections to it before scanning. You can sharpen, colour correct, and enhance your image with a full array of tools, including colour restoration, Dust Removal, Digital ICE, and Digital ICE Lite (film and slides only).

Scan speeds were reasonable in our tests, if unexceptional. Full previews of documents and photos were achieved in around 10 seconds, while a 6x4-inch scan (600dpi) took around 15 seconds, A4 line art (300dpi) around 25 seconds, an A4 colour page (600dpi) around 40 seconds, 35mm colour film and transparencies (2400dpi) around 1 minute, while medium format positive film (3200dpi) took around 4 minutes. If you do decide to get the optional ADF, bear in mind that you can't have both it and the transparency adapter connected to the scanner at the same time.

Scan performance was generally very good, with respectable colour saturation levels and sharpness. However, the scanner falls slightly short on dynamic range (the ability to see each shade across the entire range from white to black), and its dust removal transparency tools were a little heavy-handed. For instance, even at the medium setting the scanner erased some text from our scans. Nevertheless, the Perfection 4490 Photo did an excellent job of producing high-resolution scans of text, photos, and transparencies. [7.5]