Epson Expression: My "go-to" scanner on the job
Written: Nov 22 '06 (Updated Nov 22 '06)
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Pros: very fast, great job with color, picks up all details
Cons: Glossy photo scans can be streaky, slide scans look blurry
The Bottom Line: The Epson Expression is a nice professional scanner that is fast, durable, and gives sharp, beautiful scans.
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| Paulblow's Full Review: Epson Expression® 1680 Professional Flatbed S... |
I am a professional scanner. A "scanmaster" if you will... that is actually the production credit I receive in a magazine publication I scan for. So I've done quite a bit of scanning: paintings, b&w line art, color art, grayscale art, photographs, transparencies, film negatives and slides. The Epson Expression 1680 professional firewire scanner is one of the scanners we have in the art department at the company I work for. The other scanner is a large 11x17 Umax scanner, but the Epson Expression is my preferred scanner, my "go-to" guy, and I have been very happy with it over the past three years that we've had it.
The main reason I love the Expression is that it is fast, but still gets great quality scans that are sharp and pick up all the details, plus it gets color pretty much right on, meaning that I don't have to do too much color correcting. The scanning preview that it gives you takes about 20 seconds, much faster than the Umax we also have. Of course, this scanner will give different results depending on which scanning software you use with it (I usually use Epson Scan, but the Silverfast software is also an option) and there is almost always cleaning of scans, level adjustments and color correction to be done on on raw scans before they will be good to go. The way I prefer to scan is to use the scanning software's default settings for color and grayscale, and make all my adjustments to the scan in Photoshop. That being said, here's how the Expression 1680 breaks down as far as scanning different types of media:
1) BLACK AND WHITE LINE ART: The company I work puts out a lot of comic books and comic book related books as well as a magazine, and most of the original comic art I scan is black and white line art. The usual method is to scan this type of art at a high resolution -- 1200 dpi is the norm. The Expression is fast: an 8x11 piece scanned at 1200 dpi takes about four minutes to scan, and the scans look great. The same scan done on our Umax takes over five minutes to scan. You can set the scanning resloltuon up to 3200 dpi actually, but the highest I ever use is 2400 dpi for line art. Also, lot of art has pasted on panels which often times on other scanners result in shadows and black "paste-up" lines, but the Expression doesn't pick up the paste-up lines except for the very worst ones.
2) GRAYSCALE ART: This type of art is usually scanned at 300 dpi, sometimes up to 1200 dpi. At 300 dpi, an 8x11 piece of grayscale art takes about 60 seconds to scan. That's fast! At 1200 dpi, it's about a four minute wait. Again, the results are very nice, professional quality scans after Photoshop adjustments.
3) COLOR ART: Besides being fast, another reason I love this scanner is because it does a great job with color. What I usually try to do with a scan is try to make it look as close to the original art as I can. The Expression does a fantastic job with color, and usually I don't have to do too much color correcting on a color scan except for adjusting the levels in Photoshop. An 8x11 color piece scanned at 300 dpi takes about 90 seconds to scan.
4) PHOTOGRAPHS: This is one weakness of the Expression 1680, is that often when scanning glossy photographs, there will be streaks in the scan. A lot of times you can't see the streaks on the computer monitor, but they can show up when printed or when you adjust the levels in Photoshop. Since you can't usually see the streaks on the computer monitor, this isn't really an issue when scanning photos for the web, but it is something to watch for when scanning for print. The Expression does much better streakless scans with matte photos, though. At my job I use our Umax scanner for photos since it doesn't pick up any streaks, even with glossy photographs.
5) TRANSPARENCIES/FILM NEGATIVES: With the optional transparency lid, you can scan any sized film negative or positive transparencies with the Expression, and the results are great. Transparency and negative holders come with the scanner and they should always be used for best results. (Scanning film without the holders will often result in "Newton Rings" in the scans, which look like oil rings on water.) The Expression's scanning preview is much slower when previewing transparencies/negatives, but the scanning speed is still about the same as flatbed scanning depending on what resolution you scan at. I usually scan 4x5 inch postive transparencies at 300 dpi, 275% scale or so and it takes four or five minutes to scan. Again the color comes out great, although there usually is levels adjustment to be done afterwards. I also do a lot of film negative scanning (i.e., the B&W film that was used to create printing plates) which I scan as grascale, 1200 dpi. It takes 4-5 minutes to scan this way, and once again the Expression does a nice job resluting in very clean and sharp images.
SLIDES: I haven't scanned too many slides with the Expression, but they usually end up looking pretty blurry with the Expression, since they need to be blown up so much when scanning. The Umax we have gets much sharper scans with small slides, but we just got a dedicated slide scanner that is what we now use for slides.
The Final Verdict: The Expression gets two big thumbs up from me for it's speed and it's nice output. As I said, it's much faster at previewing and scanning than our large Umax and does an even better job at capturing color than the Umax does. In fact, when our Umax goes kaput, I'm going to insist we replace it with the 11x17" Epson Expression. And compared to the average consumer scanner (I've owned two for home use) fuggetabout it! The differnce in color and sharpness is night and day! We've had our Expression 1680 for three years now, and I estimate I've done over 15,000 scans with it myself and it's still running strong. As I said earlier, most scans will still require cleaning, color correction, level adjustments and sharpening in Photoshop, but after all that is done the scans I get from the Expression 1680 are beautiful, man, just beautiful! This scanner is fast, effective, and efficient and I recommend it to anyone looking for a high quality scanner.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1300.00
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Paulblow
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Location: Seattle, WA
Reviews written: 106
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Paul Blow: A man for all seasons, a man for all reasons.
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