I have an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner. Somehow it got a deep scratch across the glass. I finally got annoyed enough to replace it. I replaced it with a piece of picture-frame glass that was cut to size. I bought it from a framing shop that sold me an off-the-shelf piece of plain glass (rather than their UV-filtering glass, or non-glare glass). However, now my scans have vertical color striping artifacts.
Here is an example of the top of a scan. The stripes are so regular all the way down that it’s hard to imagine that it is due to irregularities in the glass causing some kind of diffraction or reflection. But I can’t imagine what else I could have done at the same time to cause something like this.
Any ideas about the cause? At this point the only viable option is to go back to the original glass and live with the scratch, or replace the scanner. I cannot find glass or the entire bed as available replacement parts anywhere on the sites listed by Epson as parts suppliers.
