Best software for driving an Epson scanner?

Folks: I have an 11×17 flatbed Epson scanner (latest version). It came with Epson Scan 3.49a software, which does not seem to have been updated for nearly a decade. This sometimes gets into confused states on Windows 10 and won’t start, won’t show a preview window, and/or crashes. Plainly Epson does not want to be in the desktop software business.

I’m an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber. Epson does seem to keep the drivers for this scanner reasonably up to date. What’s the most sensible approach to scanning photos, artwork, etc.?

10 thoughts on “Best software for driving an Epson scanner?

  1. I just purchased an Epson V600 which came with Epson Scan version 3.9.2.0. I can confirm for you, with just a few days of scanning, that it has exactly the same problems. I too subscribe to CC and wish it had a better solution built in. Some of the other recommendations look good, but cost as much as my amateur level scanner. On the bright side, I’m very pleased with the results the scanner provides on the 35mm slides I’ve been scanning.

  2. This is a non-answer, but I used to deal with driver issues like this a lot for scanners, printers etc. A few years back when I switched to a Mac, I was surprised at how good the built-in driver support was. Everything worked out of the box in most cases. Windows has been catching up with Mac on the desktop side lately, but how is it that it’s already 2018 and driver issues are still a thing?

  3. Martin: “driver issues like this” is not what I intended to write about. As far as I know, the Epson drivers are functioning perfectly and, in any case, they are regularly updated. It is their application software, not updated for roughly 10 years, which is causing some issues. The application can malfunction even before you turn the scanner on or try to talk to the scanner, so I don’t think that its issues relate to device drivers.

    If Paddy (above) is correct that scanning directly into Photoshop is a high-productivity solution then I am all set (since there are, in fact, no “driver issues” as far as I know). Last I tried Photoshop for this it was extremely cumbersome (like everything else in Photoshop!).

  4. VueScan has worked very well for me for many years on GNU/Linux on several different scanners.

  5. I’ve been a Vuescan user since 2001. It’s worked well with various flatbed and film scanners throughout that time, across multiple operating systems. Excellent software and great people to work with.

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