Good news! I collected the new scanner, which was sent as a replacement for the broken one I received earlier, today from the post office, hooked it up, and was very glad to observe that it does what it's supposed to do: make nice scans! The quality is really good and everything seems to be working quite reasonably. One small minus was that the automatic loader didn't agree with my black and white Ilford film, but I guess that figures since it was curled quite a lot, and the manual says you can only use straight films for automatic loading. Putting it in the holder worked very, though, so I can start cancelling all my social appointments now, and free up a couple of months to scan all my negatives & positives .

To give an impression of the optics of the Epson V350, I scanned a slide from the trip Christel and I made to South America in 2005. It's a shot of the Cuernos del Paine in Torres del Paine national park in Chile. The first picture shows a panoramic view of the Cuernos from a distance. It has been downscaled quite a bit, so the original scan has significantly more detail. This scan was made using Epson's iscan under Linux, with a resolution of 2,400 DPI (the maximum the Linux front-end supports).

The second picture is a detail from the first one, taken from the initial high-resolution scan. I was really impressed by the detail and colors! I did hardly any tweaking, only increasing the brightness and contrast a little bit. Epson's Windows software does some pretty nifty stuff like backlight correction and color restoration, which at first sight seems to do its work quite well. Guess I'll be working more often in Windows from now on...