Square artifacts randomly appearing while scanning

I am using an Epson ES-400 scanner to convert my parents collection of photos into a digital format. Recently however I have noticed that in two or three photos of each set there are strange square artifacts appearing seemingly randomly. If I rescan the set of images a different assortment of artifacts appears.

Here is an example of the artifact I am seeing (I tried to upload the file directly but it was not behaving):


https://imgur.com/a/WKWgKnc

As you can see there is a random yellow box in the top left quadrant of the frame.

Does anyone know what this issue is caused by? I have tried changing the port I have my scanner plugged into, have restarted the scanner, as well as my PC. I am using Epson ScanSmart to bring in the photos and am fully up to date on drivers.

Please let me know if you have any ideas or solutions I may not be thinking of. The issue isn't completely awful but I would rather not have to sort through and rescan images when I have to get through a collection of thousands of them.

Thanks much!
Betta7776

You say you're running a PC therefore a version of Windows.
I would uninstall Epson Scan and the scanner driver, run disk cleanup, open Windows Power Shell Administrator (command prompt administrator) and run the following command at the System 32 prompt.
sfc /scannow
If the system file checker finds no integrity problems or fixes some reinstall EpsonScan and the scanner driver. If there are errors that are not resolved fix the OS then reinstall EpsonScan.

shutterfinger said:

You say you're running a PC therefore a version of Windows.
I would uninstall Epson Scan and the scanner driver, run disk cleanup, open Windows Power Shell Administrator (command prompt administrator) and run the following command at the System 32 prompt.
sfc /scannow
If the system file checker finds no integrity problems or fixes some reinstall EpsonScan and the scanner driver. If there are errors that are not resolved fix the OS then reinstall EpsonScan.

Click to expand...

I have uninstalled the drivers as well as ScanSmart, ran the disk cleanup, ran the command you suggested, and reinstalled with no change. The scan did not find any integrity violations.
One thing of note that I have realized as I have been troubleshooting. The artifacts are NOT random. They happen to the same images in the same locations every time, no matter what order the images are in. I am not sure if this changes anything, but figured I would let you know.

Either way, thank you so much for such a quick response. hopefully there is something else I can try that may work.

I would switch to a flatbed photo scanner.

shutterfinger said:

I would switch to a flatbed photo scanner.

Click to expand...

In an ideal world I would. I might just set those that mess up aside to do on my flatbed. I just have too many to do for it to be realistic to use the flatbed scanner. I'm 2500 scans in and only about halfway done.

Open the scanner as shown in the user manual and clean the scan path.
Clean the photos of finger prints and dust.
Does this happen more with glossy or mat surface prints?

My guess is that is not an optical problem but a dirty connector or memory error problem. The clean boundaries suggest data in a two dimensional array being addressed erroneously either by software, or hardware.

If there are any multi-conductor ribbon cables and such inside the scanner, re-seating them might be worthwhile. Vacuuming out any dust or fuzz inside on circuit boards and the like could be good in case some conductive sliver is bouncing around. It could also be some errant driver -- not necessarily for the scanner -- corrupting memory in the computer. In short, the kinda problem that can make ya crazy! While no doubt a pain to do, it might be worthwhile trying the scanner on another computer and see if the problem follows the scanner or not.

Based on the description, this sounds like a software error, rather than hardware. It could be caused by dust (something akin to the straight lines on an Epson flatbed), or it could be caused by an old cable flexing, but the pattern seems very regular to be a hardware glitch.

Are you using any kind of automated dust removal (iSRD, Digital ICE, etc.)? If so, turn it off and try scanning again. If it's the same photo(s) that always trigger the artifact, they could still have some residual silver on the negative, and it might be throwing off infrared dust removal tools.