The V30 is a CCD scanner with a maximum optical resolution of 4800 dpi.  Compared to CIS scanners, CCD models have the very small advantage of being able to capture raised details on the surface of a document. 

The embossed cover of a book jacket would be a little blurry on a CIS scanner, but looks perfect on a CCD scanner.  That can be useful if you want to use your scanner as a way of taking photos of objects you want to sell online, but any digital camera will perform exactly the same function.

On sale at the same price as the Canon LiDE 700F, the V30 can't scan negatives.  It also requires a separate power supply, as well as the USB connection to the computer.  (Canon's scanner only uses the latter).  To compensate for the loss of these two features, we were expecting that Epson's scanner would produce more accurate colours, especially after we found several problems with the 700F's colour handling.

The scanner has a reserved look, with four buttons on the front giving fast access to certain features, such as scanning a document and e-mailing it directly as an attachment.

For our tests, we used the driver's professional mode, but eventually decided turn off all of the automatic correction modes, like adjustments in sharpness and contrast.  We set gamma to 2.2.

Its energy consumption is worth noting: 12.3 while active and 4.4 W when in standby.  It's not going to cause your electricity bill to rocket, but we would have preferred it to use less power when not working.

Speed

This is a fast scanner, with an initial preview in under 10 seconds.  Scanning a 4 x 6'' photo in 300 dpi takes a little more than 7 seconds and you'll to wait around 15 seconds to capture an A4 page at the same resolution--that's pretty fast.

At higher resolutions, the V30 did better than Canon's 700F with a stamp scanned at 2400 dpi in around 40 seconds, compared to over a minute and a half.

Quality

We were hoping that this V30 from Epson would produce better results than Canon's 700F because they're both available at the same price, but Canon offers more features.  That's exactly what we found, which unfortunately doesn't make choosing between the two of them any easier.  Epson beats Canon in terms of accuracy, so on the one hand the quality is better, but on the other, there could be more features.

Original	Scanner
What to look out for: Orange tones that are hard to reproduce, details in the hair, skin tones.	96 dpi The orange areas are rather well handles without to much red--at lot less than usual, anyway.  Details in the hair are clearly visible.
What to look out for: Details in the hair, skin tones.	300 dpi The level of detail on the face is still satisfactory, despite a slight lack of gradients and sharpness in the hair.
What to look out for: You should be able to see eyelashes and eyebrows.	600 dpi All of the details are blurry and confused.  There are no details on the ears.  At this point, you need to think about reactivating the automatic correction options.

The V30 also has a 'sharpness' mode, but the results aren't as surprising as on the LiDE 700F, but individual strokes and white areas are noticeably better.  Blurriness disappears.

Without sharpness mode	With sharpness mode

Another advantage that this Epson scanner has over its Canon rival is that turning on sharpness mode does not affect the shade of the red ink in our stamp.  That's perfectly logical, of course, but with Canon's scanner, it does move.

It's worth noting that although sharpness and the presence of detail is very important, having accurate colours is indispensable.  In this test, the top row represents the scanned image, while the bottom shows the ideal colours.  Visually, the colours are pretty accurate, apart from the black.


Quantitatively, that gives the following results:


That's an average discrepancy of around 6%, not much  further below the rather value offered by Canon's scanner.  But the errors here are more evenly spread out, and much less problematic for the quality of the scan.  The Epson scanner washes out blacks a lot less (but does add a slight green tinge) and respects the red and oranges tones to which the human eye is particularly sensitive.

Finally, without actually claiming to deliver performance appropriate for a professional photographer, the V30 does pretty well.  It's a pleasant surprise, to find that its scans are better than some professional scanners whose tests we'll be publishing soon.  It's also more accurate than our in-house professional scanner, which is two years old.  Or, to put it another way: until we find something better, we'll be using this one in the lab for a while.