My first review...I had to come and post my experience. My 10 year old daughter loves dreaming up books, she illustrates them and writes chapter up on chapter...well this Christmas I decided to publish one of her books on one of the sites that does it rather cheaply...(blurb) the problem is that I needed a way to scan her drawings so I could add them to the text. I had not found a scanner for under $100 that had a 5 star rating...this one only had a few reviews..but I gave it a shot.
The pictures came out crystal clear and we scanned about 13 drawings in about 10 minutes...we only used the 400 dpi setting and it did an awesome job! We used the 4600 dpi setting for a test picture of an 8x11 portrait, it took about a minute to scan but the file was HUGE...so we teseted going lower and even at 400 dpi it looks awesome~
I highly recommend this if you're scanning photographs/drawings.

I'm at 1,000 scans so far that include 35mm negatives, old slides, B&W and color photographs. No problems have been encountered so far. I would recommend this product.

Scanner works great, infinitely shorter warmup times compared to a fluorescent tubed scanner. Obviously a cheaply made scanner, but it does what it is advertised to do. Only thing I didn't like is the lid being hinged to one side.

Over the years I have been through several scanners both at work and at home. This Epson V300 is the latest home scanner for me.

Speed: Back then a high resolution scanner was like 600dpi and required a SCSI connection in order to transfer that amount of information in reasonable amount of time. Thankfully, these days USB2 is ubiquitous and relatively high speed, so the bottleneck is really no longer at the connection nor the scanner. Instead, I found that I am usually CPU bounded because of all the image processing that happens *after* the data has been transfered to my computer. After all, 4800x9600dpi is a lot of information to go through. So yes, it can give you a slow scanning experience, but it's not the scanner's problem at all. I also note this scanner use an LED lighting source, the warmup time is about three seconds. This is much shorter than the older CFL scanners that can take a minute or two to warm up.

Scanning quality: This is top-notch, especially given the price. I've seen results from much more expensive scanners including an high-end scanner from HP. At 1200dpi, which is a common setting for my workflow, I don't detect any material differences in the images, which is a good sign. If anything, the tiny difference is in the optical performance, most likely due to the coating on the glass that separates the document and the sensor. In particular, I do see a bit more chromatic aberration. However, this is something that can be corrected in software and I believe it is present in all scanners.

Software: Having been an HP user for so long, I find the Epson Scan utility to be adequate and I actually like it better than HP's offering. It has all the features that I expect. Note that I did not install the other two included softwares---"Arcsoft MediaImpression" and "ABBYY Fine Reader Spring Plus OCR". The former I have no interest, the second one is a lite version of ABBYY's commercial OCR product. I happen to have another OCR solution at my disposal and so I skipped this up-sell offering as well. Note that I am a Windows user and so I can't speak for the Mac side of the story.

Overall, I am positively impressed with this scanner. If this is your first scanner, I don't see anything that can go wrong.

Re:
Epson Perfection V300 Photo Color Scanner (Black)

My wife and I decided to create a set of family photo albums as Christmas gifts this year. We acquired numerous old photos from my relatives in Germany while on vacation there. The albums were to be produced electronically. This led to a search for a scanner. Although there are many of these on the market, we limited our search to a basic unit suitable to our needs.

We decided on the Epson scanner simply because we still have an Epson laser printer that dates back to the days of Windows 3.1 and it still works perfectly.

We have not been disappointed with the Epson Perfection V300 that we purchased through Amazon.com. It performs well and flawlessly enacts every facet of its capabilities such as scanning slides or large documents in addition to photos of course.

We recommend this scanner to anyone who merely wants to scan home photos. Obviously, the far more expensive scanners targeted toward the professional market would outclass the V300 but then we would be comparing apples to oranges.