You don't see a lot of desktop scanners about these days - between digital cameras and the rise of all-in-one units that combine scanners, copiers, printers into a single device.

Epson's new Perfection V500 Photo Scanner, which is selling for between $525 and $650, GST included, is exclusively a scanning device and is pretty cheap considering that its 6400 dpi resolution is on par with outrageously expensive drum scanners of a few years ago. Not bad for a plastic flatbed scanner that sits on your desk and does both reflection and transmission scans.

That means that you can at last tidy up those old slides and negatives you accumulated in the days before digital and those family albums you've inherited too.

Scanning film or negatives will usually give much better results than scanning prints, because you can capture more of the brightness range of the picture and you're omitting a generation of reproduction errors.

Although Epson has included a useful bundle of software to do optical character recognition (OCR), make copies by scanning straight to a printer, send faxes and manage your files, the essentials are the scanner driver and its user interface and Photoshop Elements, Windows and Mac versions of which are bundled for those lacking any proper photo editing software.

These are well designed and easy to use; the other stuff, not so much. It's called a Photo Scanner, not a small business scanner, and the emphasis is on picture scanning. If you already have Photoshop the software installation will add an item under the File/Import menu.

I tried it out with some Ektachrome slides I took at the Rolling Stones' concert at Western Springs in 1973.

The V500 did the best scans I've ever had of these old shots; sharp enough to easily reveal focus and movement blur problems from the day I took the pictures.

Colours were rich and saturated - surprisingly so, since the V500's density range is only log3.4, well below the log4 range of those old drum scanners.

But it didn't seem to matter; the Epson scanning software has a "professional" mode that allows plenty of tweaking to make the scan range match the important parts of the image.

Thanks to an instant-on LED source and USB 2.0 connections the V500 is pretty quick, which in my case means five or six minutes per slide, followed by potentially endless fiddling with unsharp masking, colour balance, dodging and burning and so on. Not to mention painting out dust spots - it seems slides can pick up unbelievable amounts of dust just sitting in a drawer for 35 years, and Epson's ICE dust removing software doesn't work too well.

For both casual and serious users the V500 is terrific value for money.