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Epson 1680 Pro Scanner

Iain Laskey looks at a serious scanner at a serious price

Being almost totally converted to digital photography now, I was recently looking for a film scanner  to get some of my better 35mm negatives (both of them!) into the digital domain to preserve them for posterity. At the same time I was interested in looking at some of the better flatbed scanners around. Epson suggested I looked at their 1680 Pro which is essentially a 1680 scanner with bundled film holder/transparency adapter. Existing 1680 owners can buy this adapter separately to gain all the hardware features of the Pro bundle.

When faced with the 1680 Pro, the first thing that comes to mind is weight.  It’s big and heavy and built like a tank with chunky metal hinges with springs to help support the lid. The transparency adapter itself is twice the weight of a normal scanner and the whole unit when put together feels about the same weight as a 17inch monitor. The huge box also contains the software bundle comprising of Presto Page Manager, drivers, TextBridge OCR, Adobe Photoshop 5 and Silverfast AI ( www.silverfast.com ), the latter being an extremely powerful pro level scanning and image processing package. The package is rounded off with a USB cable.

The scanner has SCSI and USB connections with Firewire as an optional extra. I tested it using the SCSI connection. Make sure you read in the installation manual as the existence of a transport locking bolt isn’t obvious – ahem!

 First Impressions

The basic specifications are 1600 by 3200 resolution with 48bit colour depth. You can also scan in 65,536 shades of grey although the TWAIN driver warns that not all packages can handle the resulting files.  I tried some and they’re not lying. The actual scanning area is 8.5 by 11 inches. The drivers support network usage allowing scanning and full control from others PCs on a LAN which can be very useful even in a home LAN  environment although the small office is where such capabilities really come in to use.

The specs translate well in to real world scanning with the 1680 producing excellent scans at a variety of resolutions. The colour fidelity and detail are both excellent with shadows and highlights being well handled. The SCSI interface ensures very high speeds even at the higher resolutions.

The TWAIN driver is easy to use if you use the standard settings for different types of scanning job. However, for the more advanced user there are more than enough options and adjustments to be had. Power users will find the SilverFast software allows some impressive image manipulation to be made at scan time and after. Silverfast can also be used as a plug-in for the supplied Photoshop 5 package allowing maximum control and creativity if needed. At this price point you’d be shooting yourself in the foot if you didn’t get to grips with the power that is available here.

Negative?

As mentioned, one of the main reasons I wanted to look at the 1680 Pro is for its photo negative scanning. The hefty adapter bolts to the top of the scanner in place of the original lid and as such it becomes a single unit. Along with the adaptor, Epson provides a number of plastic carriers for different sizes of negatives including slides, 35mm as well as larger formats. The negatives are clipped in to the carriers which then sit on the scanner glass.

The quality of transparency scans is extremely impressive. I tried a variety of different scenes, some too bright, some too dark and some properly balanced. The resulting images seemed comparable to the results of a dedicated film scanner in the £400-£500 bracket. An advantage of the holders is that they keep the negatives away from the glass surface of the scanner. This helps prevent Newton Rings when scanning. The TWAIN driver allows you to prescan a set of negatives then outline which ones you want final scans of. The driver then produces separate files for each one which can be a great time saver. At the maximum resolution speed does tend to suffer somewhat but with this level of automation, this is less of an issue. You’ll also need to allow a lot of disk space as the resulting file sizes can be quite large which may come as a shock if you’ve never scanned at such high resolutions before.

The only real problem I had was that it got a bit fiddly swapping from negatives to normal scans as this requires you to add/remove an extra reflector panel depending on what you are doing. However, I can’t see that there is much Epson can do to get around this.

Conclusion.

The price is extremely high for a home user and The 1680 Pro can be safely considered a semi-pro device. Most home and office users would find the combination of a dedicated film scanner and medium priced flatbed scanner to be a cost effective alternative. However, if you do need both film scanning and top quality reflective scanning then the 1680 Pro should be high on your short list. The combination of quality hardware, a generous and powerful software bundle and network features makes it a formidable scanner indeed.

Iain Laskey