Add the Epson Perfection 4180 Photo ($250 street) to the small but growing list of flatbed scanners that takes film scanning seriously. It's designed, in part, to scan not just 35-mm slides and film but medium-format film, including 2.25-inch, 120, and 6- by 6-centimeter formats. And it does a more than credible job, with scan quality scores at the high end of good for prints and good for slides, along with overall scores of good for photos and very good for slides.

The claimed 4,800-ppi optical resolution is overkill for most purposes. Scan a 35-mm slide at 4,800 by 4,800 ppi, resize the image to print at even 11 by 17 inches, and the image resolution will be over 300 ppi, much higher than will make any difference in the printed output. That said, the higher a scanner's maximum resolution, the more likely it will deliver at lower resolutions, like the 2,400 ppi you might realistically use for scanning a slide. And indeed, the 4180 resolved detail better than the current Editors' Choice, the CanoScan 8400F

Unfortunately, the 4180 falls short of the 8400F on dynamic range, as indicated by its inability to retain details based on differences in shading. In one slide with a dark tree line against a bright sky, for example, the 8400F scan retained virtually all of the detail. In the 4180 scan, much of the detail in the tree line disappeared in a solid mass of black.

One nice touch that the 4180 shares with the Epson Perfection 2580 Photo is an automatic mode that prescans, adjusts settings based on the scan target, and then scans. We timed it at 29 to 34.2 seconds for a 4-by-6-inch photo at 300 ppi. Scanning the same photo manually at 400 ppi took 7 seconds for the prescan, and 19.7 seconds for the scan. Scanning a slide at 2,400 ppi took a somewhat sluggish 1:25.

Performance on our OCR tests was uneven. The scanner's bundled software, Abbyy FineReader Sprint OCR, read Arial fonts as small as 6 points without a mistake but had trouble with all Times New Roman fonts smaller than 12 points. Similarly, the bundled business card reader, Newsoft Presto! Bizcard, tripped up on some card formats.

Neither of the aforementioned issues is major, but they don't help make the case for the 4180 either. And although we like the 4180, it's hard to recommend unreservedly with the CanoScan 8400F offering equally good, if not better, scans at less than half the price.

Sub-ratings:
Photos:
Slides:
Business cards:
OCR: