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Installation was a snap. It will retain your settings from scan to scan. I purchased this ADF to go on my Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner. What does that mean. If you are a consumer and need an ADF that will automatically feed paper documents (and presumably scan each one) without spending a fortune, it will work for you. Photos load and feed rather effortlessly. You must do this for each photo.
Every image requires a prescan and scan.I did not try to batch scan a stack of documents. I was looking for a low cost add-on that would allow me to automate scanning of many printed photos. But will not batch the whole pile. However, the Epson Scan software (comes with the scanner, not the feeder) does not allow you to run a batch on "full auto". You must prescan the image, marquee out the desired part of the image, adjust your settings and initiate the scan. I presume that it will do that. It is an Automatic Document (only) Feeder.
Given the cost of most ADFs I do have to confess that I wasn't expecting much. I have yet to experience an error, jam, or large misalignment. It turns out that this is quite a solid functioning machine. The feeding is fantastic. The noise level is far below what I would expect; it's not quiet by any means but I do not find the noise distracting if I am working in the same room. The one thing that I don't like is that the general alignment of the scan head and the feeder are off horizontally just a hair so there is a tiny black stripe on one side of the scan.
I can't believe I went as long as I did without a document feeder on my scanner. However, the document feeder has the regularly recurring habit of feeding sheets at a slight but increasing angle until, eventually, it jams. When I bought this new scanner I almost balked at the cost of the document feeder.The scanner is simply outstanding, and had I been reviewing it alone I'd have to give it five stars. If I were reviewing the document feeder strictly based on time and labor savings, five stars again. Yes, you can work around it, but it's a colossal pain when it happens.If you want perfectly aligned, trouble-free scans, spend even more money and get a scanner with built-in document feeder. If you can life with the occasional crooked page and occasional jam, this combination is tough to beat.One star off for the light-weight feeder workmanship; otherwise, I love this scanner and document feeder.
Only problem is the path the the picture feeds through to scan is a clear plastic sheet and it already had scratched on it. I kept getting Red and Green lines on my scanned images. I went to Help online and there was a section on how to clean the scan "glass" to remove dust and such. Can't clean those.Now if you didn't have the lines: The APF is GREAT and the few I did try running through it went through straight, no jams. Not too noisy and the software is pretty easy to work also.
A robust bit of equipment, it seldom jams or sucks up more than one page at a time. Also, it's rather loud.Overall, we've been very pleased with it. Not-so-nice bits: You do have to keep an eye on it, since it's not totally immune to making a mistake.
We were having some streaky image problems (see below) and Epson tech support advised us that the ADF was chiefly meant for document scanning, not image scanning. (I'm not sure why glossy documents cause this problem more than non-glossy. It's hard to judge the exact speed (or lack thereof), but it seems to process five to ten pages per minute, depending on resolution.
If you're scanning glossy documents (like photos), you have to continually clean the scan area, because it gets very streaky from dust. But once our problem was resolved, it seemed to do a good job with images.Nice bits: The tray can be adjusted to fit smaller pieces of paper, which decreases the risk of jamming. When it does jam, it's very easy to open up and fix.
but they do). For the price it does very fine work.
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