In an age when everything is digital, what do you do with all your old 35mm negatives, especially if the photos you originally printed of them have become damaged, lost or faded? Answer: you can either take them down to the corner photo shop and get them re-printed the old-fashioned way or you can pick up a scanner like the Epson Perfection V350 Photo and indulge in a bit of DIY.

Everything about this piece of equipment is designed to be easy. For a start it's very easy on the eye, in sleek, smooth, silver colour with four clearly-labelled buttons (Start, Copy, Scan to e-mail and Scan to PDF) for simple operation.

You can also rotate it to suit your desktop, as it includes an innovative portrait and landscape scanning option and the lid is no longer hinged at the short end but halfway down the long side. So now the lid can be opened to 90 or 180 degrees (to allow you to scan thicker objects and documents up to 25mm thick) or even removed entirely.

The main highlight, though, is the pop-up Automatic Film Loader which is built into the lid and allows you to feed in a strip of 35mm film up to six frames long. It doesn't matter whether it's black and white, negative or positive, the scanner will read it, identify it, scan it, store it and then give you the option to print it, save it or export it.

In addition, there's a separate film and transparency holder which will hold two mounted slides and three frames of film; which is odd, as the lesser model, the V100, holds twice as many of each.

When it comes to the quality of the scanned pictures as well as the speed of operation, it's a mixture of positive and negative, if you'll forgive us. The good news is the impressive optical resolution of 4,800 x 9,600dpi, which can produce exceptionally high standard images in 48-bit colour.

The scanner uses a new Matrix CCD Micro Lens technology that maximizes light sensitivity and this is further enhanced by its 3.2 Dmax optical density which picks up fine details in shadows and highlights (it says here). What this jargon means is that you will be producing virtually professional-grade prints, and certainly we had no complaints in our tests.

The downside is the general operating speed of both the scanning engine and the main software. On paper the software package looks encouraging, especially as it contains the excellent ABBYY FineReader 6 Sprint Plus optical character recognition program as well as ArcSoft PhotoImpression 5 and Epson's Creativity Suite which will help you edit, enhance and catalogue your images.

However, the main Epson Scan 3.0 control program was very sluggish when loading screens or executing commands. Even though it contains colour restoration, backlight correction and a new Digital Dust Removal utility, we had to wait a couple of minutes for just the preview scan of four 35mm negative frames to be completed, while a full A4-size colour scan took nearly ten minutes to complete.

Epson's own manual admits a Draft scan of 35mm negative film at 4,800dpi will take a shade under two minutes, so when the next upgrade comes round, speed will have to be a priority.

A stylish and affordable scanner with the unusual bonus of an automatic 35mm film loader built into the versatile lid, yet it's sadly let down by slow acting software and long scanning times.