Epson - Perfection 1660 Photo review

This is a big, beefy scanner and although it costs more than some of its competitors in this group, it also produces above average results. It sits quite high off the desk and makes a fair amount of noise when scanning, with as many buzzes and clunks as the Canon device.

A row of buttons along its front edge, including a convenient, illuminated scan button, offer one-touch copy, e-mail and scan-to-Web functions. A transparency adapter is built into the scanner's lid and it can cope with up to four slides at once, or a complete strip of 35mm negatives.

There are just two sockets at the rear of the Perfection 1660 Photo, for USB 2 and power connections. Epson's own scanner driver is easy to use and well-functioned, but if you need more photo processing muscle you can call on either ArcSoft's PhotoImpression 4 or Adobe's Photoshop Elements, both of which are bundled. Photoshop Elements, while a cut-down version of Adobe's flagship painting package, still has most of the more useful tools and filters in that product's feature-set.

Scan times for the 8 x 8-inch colour print and text page tests were impressive at 9 and 10 seconds respectively, though the transparency scan, of a single slide, was a little slow at 65 seconds. For day-to-day scanning, this is the fastest device in the group.

It also produced some of the best quality scans, straight from the box. Images were lively, without being over-vivid, and pastel colours reproduced accurately and close to their originals. The Perfection 1660 Photo is a good general-purpose scanner at a very reasonable price.