The Epson V370 not only produces scans where, for all intents and purposes, black text is black and white paper is white, but it also makes photos come out looking like the originals. As I mentioned, my Canon scanner produces muddy scans that require manually adjusting the brightness, contrast and color to get scans that look like the original. One important thing that the V370 and its software get right is the autoexposure. However, the software is rather clunky, with settings hidden away in strange places and options are forgotten and remembered in ways that don't make sense. From the way it looks you'd think it has no business running on a current Mac, but it runs without trouble. However, after searching for a bit, I found software on the Epson website and that installed without a hitch. The scanner comes with a software CD, but I had no luck installing the software on my Mac running MacOS 10.9. The Epson V370 on the other hand, is much bigger, has its own power brick and the hinge is rather inconveniently placed on the right side, with the USB and power cables on the right side of the scanner all the way at the front. On the plus side, it's compact and runs on USB bus power, so no power brick. You also have to wait for the lamp to warm up before scanning can happen.

That one gets the job done, but using the MacOS Image Capture tool I got rather muddy scans out of it. Until now, I used a Canon CanoScan LiDE 100 for that. First, let me talk about scanning regular documents. Using the word 'perfection' in the product name sets a high bar, and although it's not perfect, it's pretty good. It gets pretty good reviews and only costs about € 80 or $100. The Epson Perfection V370 Photo scanner has a transparency mode built in. Turns out that some flatbed scanners have a transparency attachment so you can scan negatives and slides. The number of photos isn't huge, maybe a few hundred, but having a service do it at 50 cents or so quickly adds up. The past years, I've been looking for a way to digitize all of these. In addition to that, I have color photos with their negatives and slides. I still have a bunch of black-and-white negatives that I developed myself, but never got them printed.

Best photo scanner reviews 2014