That makes the package only marginally useful for business-oriented applications. The business-card software is hardly worth installing, with three or more errors in nine of the ten business cards we scanned. The OCR software works reasonably well, successfully reading both font-test pages in 8-point Times New Roman and Arial without a mistake, but the usefulness is limited by the lack of an automatic document feeder. The scanner comes with bundled software for photo editing, OCR, and business cards. Also helping to speed up scanning are scan buttons on the front panel, including options to scan to e-mail, to your printer, and to PDF format. If you plan to scan a lot of negatives, however, be sure to take a look at the 3490's close cousin, the Epson Perfection 3590 Photo, which includes an automatic film feeder. The template holds up to three slides or a strip of film. Setting up a film scan is easier than with most scanners, thanks largely to a template that's almost impossible to position incorrectly. The feature, which is strictly software based, did a reasonably good job of removing dust in our test slides. The driver also offers dust removal for slides and negatives, but not for prints. If you have older, faded photos, you'll particularly like the driver's color-restore feature, which did as good a job as we've seen of bringing an old, faded test photo back to life. The driver offers three modes, including a fully automatic mode that can handle all settings for you and usually produce a good scan a professional mode that lets you tweak the image by adjusting settings such as brightness, contrast, saturation, color balance, and gamma (which effectively adjusts contrast differently for different levels of brightness) and a home mode that offers a tad more control than full auto mode. More important than raw scan speed, however, is that both the driver and hardware design help make scanning quick and easy. Scanning a slide at 2,400 ppi took 1 minute 8 seconds. We timed the 3940 at 29 to 33 seconds for prescanning and scanning a 4-by-6 photo at a number of resolutions. Fortunately, the results using the default settings for most slides should be acceptable to most casual photographers, if not serious hobbyists. The 3490 still did a credible job with film, especially on less demanding slides, but adjusting settings to get the most from each image required more work than with the Canon printers-something more than a point-and-shoot photographer would probably want to do. On one of our toughest test slides, which had a dark line of trees against a bright sky, the 3490 lost more detail in the tree line than either the CanoScan 8400F or the 9950F. Scan quality for film is highly dependent on dynamic range-the ability to see all the steps in shading across the entire range from black to white. High resolution isn't all that's needed for scanning slides, however. At 2,400 ppi, detail and sharpness were roughly equivalent to 2,400-ppi scans from the 8400F, although not a match for the more expensive Canon CanoScan 9950F, which is also a current Editors' Choice. The 3940 also did a reasonably good job resolving detail in slide scans. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.
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