Beneath the Perfection V30’s low physical profile lurks powerful scanning chops.
Recession or no, time is one of our most valuable resources--second only, perhaps, to money. With the Perfection V30 scanner, Epson offers up a way to digitize hard-copy photos and documents that doesn’t suck you dry of time or money. That is to say, this sucker is fast and cheap--in a good way. The V30, a lightweight flatbed scanner with a conveniently flat lid so you can set a stack of papers on top of it without them sliding off, measures 17 inches long by 11 inches wide by 1.6 inches tall, so it fits nicely on a desk or side table--though the included power and USB 2.0 cables are only 6 feet long, so be sure your Mac and power outlet are close enough to reach.
Setting up the V30 and getting started scanning is a 10-minute deal, especially if you eschew a lot of the “extra” bits of included software, such as ArcSoft MediaImpression (a photo-creativity app) and Abbyy FineReader Sprint Plus (for optical character recognition). We skipped those at first and just installed Epson Scan, which is a bit fiddly--and not very pretty to look at--but lets you control what image format your scans are saved in, where they’re saved, and what kind of filters (dust control, descreening, and so on) are applied, saving you time in an image-editing app later on. The FineReader OCR software could come in handy for anyone scanning text documents that need to be converted to editable files--and in our testing on a dozen or so text docs, the OCR worked well.
The V30’s speed is impressive--and it’s whisper-quiet. A 300 dpi scan to PDF of a full-color magazine cover took 47 seconds. The same page scanned as a 25MB TIFF file took 1 minute, 33 seconds. Scanned as a 1MB JPG, it took 56 seconds.
The V30 has just four buttons: Power/Scan, Scan To PDF, Copy, and Scan And Email, a handy feature that scans a document according to the specs you’ve set up in Epson Scan, then launches your default email app and lets you choose a small, medium, or large version of the scanned image to send as an attachment.
Although it’s not advertised as a photo scanner exclusively, the V30 does an excellent job scanning color photos. The scanner works natively with Photoshop, so you can import a scan directly by choosing File > Import > Epson Perfection V30/V300. The scanning area is only 8.5 by 11.7 inches, though, so your scanned images are limited to those dimensions.