Epson Perfection 2580 PHOTO > Reviews (3)

I bought this scanner to convert our slides into a digital format. It was easy to setup, and worked straight away without any major problems. It was bought for approximately £85 from ebuyer.

I then tried to buy the optional 24 photo auto feeder as advertised in the product information. At the time of writing, it does not actually exist. Having had no luck at any shops (online or otherwise), I phoned the Epson helpline: They hadn't heard of it either.

The software has many automatic features which sometimes work, but often don't (eg: automatic cropping of pictures). It can be very difficult to turn these "features" off, even in professional mode, where the settings are not obvious and hard to find.

The scanner does not appear to scan right to the edge of the platen (unless this is another setting I can't find), so if you line up a document along the edge of the platen, the edge is cut off.

The manual/help supplied is very vague with very little explanation of features. eg: It tells me how to change the densitometer sampling area, but what is a densitometer, what does it do, and how do I use it?

Overall, it is a reasonable scanner that has done everything I wanted it to, but is let down by the software, manual/help files and Epson helpline.

I checked the Epson website for a software/driver update, but it had an earlier version than that supplied with the scanner.