I bought this for home use, to scan in photos for a photo book being constructed in Aperture (on an iMac, Snow Leopard, 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM). I knew I would be working with some very old photographs (more than 100 years old), old format B&W negatives, slide film and 1970s colour prints. With a lot of material, I didn't want to wait too long for each scan.
The scanner worked fine on all prints and negatives, but consistently introduced a red line down all of the colour transparencies. Thinking that a newer driver might solve the problem, I tracked down one on the Epson website (v 3.81, rather than the ver 3.80 supplied on the CD). It didn't solve the red line problem, but it did introduce some very strange 'light bars' across the preview image. These weren't replicated in the scanned images, but they did make it much more difficut to operate the scanner and were clearly not something to be lived with. I tried rolling back to the original installation using time machine, to undo problem No: 2, but could not get back to ver 3.80 of the software.
I called Epson, who were very helpful, and we agreed that the red line problem was probably a hardware fault - they hadn't heard of it before. Amazon were excellent about the return. DHL collected the old one the next day and Amazon had already despatched the replacement scanner, so I had a new scanner very quickly.
Undoing the software fault was problematic, but eventually successful. The short story is to use the Epson scanner installer, in uninstall mode, and then reinstall the software from scratch. It's not enough to just drag the Epson app folders into the bin. Now I'm running Ver 3.80 of the scan software, with no light bar artefacts in Preview and no red lines on the colour slides. Hooray.
Now that I'm running correctly, my comments are:
1. The scanner is excellent. Quick and does a great job. I've scanned about 300 images so far. I have played with all the various settings and concluded that, most of the time, the scanner does a great job all on its own.
2. Epson were very helpful - thank you! However be wary of the later driver on their website!
3. Amazon should be commended for the speed of replacing what turned out to be a faulty product.
Thumbs up all round. Great product, and I just write off my original 'red line' problem to bad luck.