We have an Epson Perfection 1250 scanner and about 19/20 times, the result from scanning is just black. For instance, if I scan a colored photograph the preview will be completly black. We tried contacting the maker and nothng they gave us worked, what I'm basically asking is if this has happened to anyone else and what they did to fix it.

is there a setting in the scanner software to change the scanning mode? check to make sure it's not in grayscale.

Have you tried re-installing the scanner drivers? (the system software that came with it).

well when this first happened, we fixed it and it was okay, but when our hardrive crashed it starting scanning black again. And no matter what we try it still scans black. (Yes it's on color and we've tried re-installing it billions of times...)