Epson has a knack for making good photo and film scanners that don't break the bank, and the Epson Perfection V550 Photo Scanner($349.00 at Amazon) is no exception. It is very similar to the Editors' Choice Epson Perfection V500 , which it's replacing, but with two notable differences. It adds a utility that easily uploads scans to email, Facebook, and several cloud-based services. Gone, however, is Photoshop Elements, leaving the V550 without a bundled photo-editing program. Still, it brings to the table impressive scan quality, the ability to scan multiple 35mm slides or film negatives, and the Digital Ice hardware-based solution for film scanning. All this earns it the Editors' Choice for photocentric flatbed scanners.

The V550 measures 4.6 by 11.2 by 19.1 inches and weighs 9.6 pounds. It has a maximum scan area of 8.5 by 11.7 inches, and a maximum optical resolution of 6,400 dpi. It can scan up to four 35mm slides, two rows of six negatives each, or medium-format film, with the removable transparency unit. Also, it will scan multiple photo prints at a time, as its auto edge detection technology automatically detects the size of each image, crops it accordingly, and saves it as an individual file.

Like the Epson V500, the V550 includes Digital ICE—the hardware-based approach for digitally removing dust and scratches—for use in film scanning. The V550 also includes software-based dust removal for prints, but Digital ICE is preferable.

Setup and Software
Setting up the V550 is easy: Just install the software, plug in the power cord and supplied USB cable, and turn the scanner on. I installed it on a system running Windows Vista. Software includes two scan utilities—Epson Scan with Epson Easy Photo Fix technology, plus Epson Easy Photo Print—plus an OCR program, Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint. It has both Twain and WIA drivers that support scanning from nearly any Windows program with a scan command. Unlike the Epson V500 and the Epson Perfection V600 , which came with Adobe Photoshop Elements, it lacks a separate photo-editing program.

You can use any of the four scan buttons for scanning to a searchable PDF file with adjustable settings, copying (sending a scan to your printer), email (creating an email message with the scan attached as a JPEG), and launching the Epson scan utility to scan and save a file to disk in the image format of your choice. The Epson Scan utility has four modes: Full Auto, Home, Office, and Professional. The Professional mode is the one that permits film scanning, and the only one that supports Digital ICE.

When you open the Easy Photo Scan utility and press Scan, it calls up the regular Epson Scan utility, from which you can configure and launch a scan in any mode. When it's done, from within Easy Photo Scan you can do some basic editing, and upload the scan directly to Facebook, Picasa, Evernote, SugarSync, a WebDav Web folder, scan it to email, or save it in a folder on your hard drive.

Performance
I used the V550 to scan 35mm slides, film negatives, and photo prints. Scan quality was very good for a flatbed scanner of its price. I also printed out 4-by-6 prints of several of the photos I'd scanned, using a Kodak ESP 3.2, and they looked pretty close to the originals.

The scanner's LED-based light eliminates warm-up time, whether you've just finished a scan or are starting cold. Another benefit is that, unlike the cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) that most scanners use, LEDs don't contain mercury.

The V550's speed was fairly typical of a flatbed scanner. To preview and scan a 4 by 6 print in full auto mode took an average of 26 seconds, nearly the same as with the V500. Scanning slides at 2,400 dpi in professional mode took an average of 28 seconds for the prescan and 33 seconds for the scan itself. Enabling Digital ICE increased the scan time for slides to 2 minutes 19 seconds. Both scan times were slightly faster than the V500, which effectively matched the V550's prescan time but averaged 48 seconds for the scan and 2:32 with Digital ICE enabled.

As it lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF), the V550 is less than ideal as a document scanner, but is still good for light-duty use, and the included Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint is a capable OCR program for home use.

The Epson Perfection V550 Photo Color Scanner's ability to directly post scans to Facebook and popular cloud services is a nice added convenience to keep up with the times. Its impressive scan quality, coupled with features like the ability to scan multiple 35mm slides or film negatives, and the Digital ICE hardware-based solution for film scanning all combine to give the V550 our nod as the new Editors' Choice photocentric scanner.

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