The EPSON Perfection V33

I introduce you to my new toy:

It's an EPSON Perfection V33 flat bed scanner. I picked her up from my local Dick Smith (which is extremely different from the DickSmith's Electronics you remember from your childhood) store.

The reason I got it? It works on my iMac and on OSX 10.7 (with a little hoop jumping) and I didn't have to wait a couple weeks for it to ship to me. It's only an A4 scanner (I would have rather of had a larger scanning area), and as I won't be using it on my Windows box I can't use the bundled Arcsoft® Scan-n-Stitch Deluxe package to seamlessly stitch larger image together. But apart from that I'm quite happy with this 4800 x 9600dpi scanner.

It's image quality is good:

It's a page out of the 'EBS Bulletin 5: Earth-wall Construction, 3rd Edition', published by the Australia Government Publishing Service in 1982 (used as demonstration material only and in fair dealing... It was all I had close at hand that would show the scanners detail). As you can see the diagrams are crisp and detailed as well as the text being perfectly legible, even when zoomed wight in.

You can scan documents and create a single PDF out of the images, as well as using character recognition software to make documents searchable (Windows only option). This PDF creation feature is one of the reasons I got it. I plan to make copies of my design journals so as to preserve them =D

I'll be using it to duplicate documents, designs made with pen and paper, and many other things I imagine.
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Now, as I said there is some hoop jumping to get it to work on Mac OSX 10.7 and up. The included CD is supposed to come with all you need to get it to work... Except it's not.

The included application crashes when opened, sometimes even opening to a menu before crashing so as to get your hopes up. You will need to go to the American EPSON support page (not the Australian or New Zealand OSX 10.7 compatibility page as they have nothing on them):

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?oid=154806&infoType=Downloads&platform=OSF_M_X7

Where you will find downloads for the EPSON scan utility & driver package, the event manager (to assign actions to scanner button pushes) and the ICA scanner driver for Apple's Image Capture utility. All of these work and the drivers update through Apple perfectly.