The scanner was bought as a replacement for a five year old "best buy" scanner which although top notch for its time, was beginning to look rather puny in comparison to the new kids on the block. I paid £84 in a sale although the RRP was £94.

Installing the software was very straightforward and with eager anticipation I set to reading the reference guide which came on the disc. I quickly found that the guide contained very little information of any use whatever. It is sloppily translated from whatever the language was in which it was first written.

Having had bad experiences previously with maufacturers support lines and a poor opinion of interactive support sites, I didn't use these, preferring to bash on by myself. I had therefore to learn to use the scanner by trial and error. This too is not satisfactory and in my view the reference guide is something which needs to be looked at by Epson. Perhaps their own support is excellent, but I don't suppose I'll ever know. I've had to give it a rating in order that the review is accepted so it gets "Satisfactory." A decent set of instructions would mean Support would not be an issue for most users.

On other occasions the negative strip was accepted but the feeder again churned away without stopping, even when the strip appeared to be loaded. At these times it would take a fit and lock itself into a noisy wrestling match with the film strip. The lack of instruction means that it is very unclear what you can do to clear the jam when the eject button fails to work and again this could lead to damage. It can be a bit of a nerve wracking experience, perhaps though for a non-dedicated film scanner perfection shouldn't be expected.

Used as a document or print scanner the area being scanned doesn't reach to the edges of the scanner bed, so a piece is trimmed from the edge of your picture. To get a complete picture, the snap has to be aligned along some object such as a ruler, placed along the edge of the bed so as to get the whole object in scan while avoiding misalignment.

After all this it could be assumed that I'm not impressed with the Perfection 2580 Photo. Odd to say this is not the case.

Resolution goes all the way up to 12,800 dpi. A full size 6 X 4 would take some time at this sort of figure but I can't imagine any circumstance where you'd want to do this. A tiny 10mm square surviving scrap of an 80 year old picture scanned at this resolution in 30 seconds and filled a 19 inch screen at only 17% of its full size. A scanned 35mm negative similarly clear and detailed brought marvellously to life scenes of a childhood from 40 years ago.