My view of the world

I just bought an Epson 4490 scanner and I’ve started scanning a whole bunch of old slides, mostly from the late 40s and early 50s. The resulting copy is beautiful, but scanning 4 at a time takes between 8 and 12 minutes per set.
I’m scanning them at 48 bit color and 4800 dpi and saving them as Tif files and as such they are almost 150 meg each, and the bad part is that you can see every piece of dust and every scratch or bubble on the film.

I think that at $250.00 from Compusa with a $50 mail in rebate this scanner is about all an amatuer needs, If you are going pro there are a number of better units, but the cost is astronomical, with the good low end models costing about $35k.

All I want to do is take a bunch of family photos that are currently on slide and salvage them before they completely deteriorate.

This scanner comes with a plastic guide and the Epson driver software, it also comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.
I’m using Photoshop CS2 and sometimes Paintshop Pro X, so I can’t say how well the Photoshop Elements 2 works, but several reviewers have good things to say about it, the only thing I remember reading that was less than complimentary, was that Elements wouldn’t handle 48 bit color.
On the whole I’m impressed with how much better this scanner is than my HP standard flat bed.