Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-Speed Photo Scanning System with Auto Photo Feeder

So my wife and I have inherited thousands of pictures and we don't have a lot of space. We wanted to scan them all, but having scanned small amounts of pictures in the past, I know what an ordeal it is to do that, and the thought of doing thousands, maybe tens of thousands is too daunting to even consider. So I found this scanner and read and watched several reviews. $600 is a lot of money to plunk down on a scanner, and I was skeptical about how useful this would be. I am an IT professional and I have used many a piece of fancy equipment that you have to spend more time fixing or un jamming rather than reaping any benefits out of it. I can only say that this is the most amazing scanner I have ever used and if you have literally thousands of photos to scan, it's worth twice what I paid for it. My wife and I spent about 4 hours on Sunday, and we scanned 3261 pictures, which had filled up 2 large boxes. Most of the time was spent by either my wife sorting the pictures into decades and looking for duplicates and by both of use removing some photos from albums. I can't really say how much of that was actual scanning, but the scanning portion is so very quick and easy, it's absolutely amazing. Aside from it being quick and painless, it is also fantastic. For starters it automatically scans the back of the pictures without any loss of speed. so if you have notes written on the back, you won't lose them, and it's smart enough to "detect" writing, so it won't just automatically scan the backs unless there is something on it worth keeping (this is configurable, so you can either adjust the threshold or have it scan all backs anyway). It will also automatically color / exposure correct all of the photos for you and give you the option of updating the original scan, or saving it as an alternate file. I pretty much liked most or all of the adjusted photos more than the originals, but my wife liked some of the originals better, so we wound up using the multiple file option, which gives you a little more work afterwards, but it's great to have the option... Another really amazing thing is the feed / scanner system. While there are guides on the feeder to select the size, I've found that you absolutely don't need them for most things. You can put photos of completely different sizes in the same batch and it will handle them just fine. Also, on rare occasions I have seen it miss-feed a photo and it goes through slightly crooked, but somehow the scan comes out perfectly straight. The auto feed says it allows you to put 30 photos in, but I have actually gotten a couple more than that, but for the most part it's probably going to be less than that for most batches. Also, If the photos have too much curl in them, you're going to find that you'll have to put fewer photos in a batch or else it may jam on the first picture. The printer includes a sleeve for scanning damaged or extremely fragile items, and I used it for a few news paper clippings, but using it will require you to edit the photo and crop out the sleeve itself. Also, after using the sleeve a few times I tried putting some newspaper clipping through without the sleeve and it worked just fine, so the scanner really is extremely gentle on whatever passes through it. About the only thing it doesn't do is polaroid pictures, if you have boxes of those, don't get this, they are too thick to go through the feeder and will jam every time. Luckily we only had 1 of those, but I was able to test it out and verify it won't work. (It also states it's not for polaroids in the manual). Bottom line, if you are faced with a large picture scanning project, you should absolutely buy this, now.

In the first five days of using this scanner I scanned more than 5000 photos. Not only is the scanner very fast, it handles stacks of old, odd size formats with ease and with rarely a misfeed. The automatic color correction is remarkably good. While it requires the photos in each batch to be the same size, it easily accomdates small variations without a problem. The software that comes with it (I am using the Mac OS version--Sierra) is easy to use and has fairly flexible file naming capability. One feature that I found to be extremely useful was the ability to detect writing on the back of photos and to simultaneously scan both sides. The filenames are tagged with "a" and "b". For example 1999_Christmas_0001_a and 1999_Christmas_0001_b. It will also save a version without color corrections, but I found the correction to be reliable enough that I didn't bother with that. The feed path is short and straight through and I had no trouble with damage to any of my photos. While it can also scan documents, I have only done a few and have not tried stacking them. The bottom line is that, if like me you have years of photos to scan, it will save you an enormous amount of time when compared to using a flat bed scanner while producing faithful copies of the originals. Of course if your goal is making copies that can be greatly enlarged or edited, then it would be better to use a flat bed and more sophisticated software. Finally, I note that several reviewers received their scanners free to test and write reviews, I did not. I purchased it at full price.

Have thousands, upon thousands of pictures to scan. I choose this scanner for two reasons: a.) 600 dpi vs regular 300dpi of other sanners b.) Auto feeder Ever since I received FF640 - its been great. Very simple to get running. Be sure, however to follow the 4 simple steps - that it has.. and install the software drivers in the order that it tells you! The epson scanning software is a little "clunky" but it gets the job done. I have turned on the all the auto-correct features that comes with the software and works great for me. You can pick the year, season and a description ( any combination thereof) .. the software creates a folder, and just start scanning. Can scan about 25-30 pics at once... takes just a few minutes. Again.. the FF-640 just works. The biggest challenge has nothing to do with the product, but more to do with organizing the pictures into sequence, "set" and size. In other words, putting all of Christmas 2007 pictures together, in sequence and then by size. You can keep scanning "batch (up to30 pics) after batch, into the same folder. The second biggest challenge, again.. has nothing to do with the product.. but that of creating "tags'" on the photos..after I have scanned them in. Sure, they are all now logically in the same folder.. but if I want to "tag" Aunt Mary and uncle Bob, in each photo.. that takes different software. I down the loaded the fatPhotoTaggerv3 ... and that works well. Again... nothing to do with the actual scanning.. but needful to keep up with what you have scanned. Can't say enough about how simple and fast this product is for scanning photos. Only photos that you probably can't scan are the polaroid pictures created during the 70's = 80's. (the ones with the big white boarder at the bottom) .. Reason being is the.. those specific type pics are thicker. I have not tried to scan them, but seems like a bad idea. To be clear . the older polaroids created anytime before the 70's scan just great!! So easy to scan older photos..

I've been scanning the accumulated photographic store of three generations of our families. This is literally over 10000 prints. This is a fast, high quality scanner. I've only used the Epson FastFoto software, so won't comment on that. I use FastFoto with Dropbox to scan and load prints into LightRoom. The unit is a FF-640 with up to 1200dpi scanning. The Scanner is very fast, with a easy to clean paper path. For this review, I loaded 16 4x6 prints and ran with color correction but no streak correction. The first print took about 15 seconds, but all 16 were scanned in about 55 seconds. There is some additional software processing of what seems like a minute or two that runs when you complete a set, but that seems to be about the same even if I run hundreds of prints in a set. To run 16 prints on a flat bed, scanning both sides when necessary would run me 15 to 45 minutes. I am much more error prone with hand scanning, and while I can color correct about as well with VueScan or some others, I have not found anything that associates the back image with the front as well. It is heavily built by the standards of the last several years, and quite quiet. There are two areas of concern that I had when I read the reviews prior to purchase and I want to concentrate on these: dust control and print handling. Dust Control: Photos carry significant dust on their surface, and with every scan some of that can transfer to the unit. The software has a nag message that reminds you to clean the print path ever so many cycles. I've found that using a squeeze bulb and dustless wipes keeps everything acceptably clean. Dust introduced per print is probably the same for every scanner. High throughput means you have more dust and have to clean often. I additionally cover the unit when it is not being used with a fitted cover. If you wipe every print before scanning, dust will be less of an issue, but your speed will be much lower. For family photos, I've chosen to run without wiping. If in my LightRoom workflow I find a print that I want better quality, I'll go back and rerun it. If you are doing professional conversions, then cleaning the prints and the printer platten have to be part of your workflow. The speed of the scan cycle won't have as much impact, as it won't be the bottleneck in the process. Paper Handling: The print transport path works really well for modern prints of average weight. By modern prints, I mean from the introduction of the edgeless print. My examples of these prints never seem to be very curled. Everything I have from the mid-70s up to today has run well as long as I sorted the prints by size and don't overload the hopper. It will jam rather than feed multiple prints that are stuck together. It jams if there is a large variation in print width, or if you don't sort by length for the similar width. They claim a 30 print capacity, and that seems pretty close. Heavier weight prints need to be run in smaller batches, but feed ok. Once you get to the weight of a 1980's post card or studio print, the mechanism seems to struggle. Once you are dealing with prints from before the mid-70's curling will be much more common. Prints with curling will be a issue for the transport and the scan quality. I looked at some museum archival blogs and they recommended humidifying the prints to take out the curl. I built a humidifier out of a large plastic storage box and can flatten and dry about 30 prints in a batch. Those will scan very nicely within a few minutes of coming out of the drying press. If you wait too long after the humidification, they'll curl back up. The process is a lot slower than with flat prints, but given the difficulty of maintaining print placement on a flatbed, seems a good tradeoff. If you are dealing with curled prints, a flatbed may be as fast as the FF-640, but the efficiency of correction and two-sided scanning were worth it to me. This scanner has made my volume of scanning feasible. Dirt and dust control are important for any scanning, and high volume increases the need for good cleaning practices. Heavily curled prints pose special problems that aren't solved by this unit, but the time I need to invest in that subset of my scanning is now less intimidating that the total project time I would have had to invest without this.

Great unit. I was skeptical especially at this price. Used it back up 5000 photos because I didnt want them to leave the house- and outside services were either poor res quality or VERY expensive. The high speed setting on the unit is good quality and really does process around 30 photos per minute. This hi res speed is much slower but better quality. I was using this for 10-20 year old snapshot quality photos on paper (i.e. pre-digital cam) so the underlying image quality was just OK, very glad to have them archived. If your careful about feeding stacks it can take 30 at a time and jams rarely. when it does its easy to open and unjam. Has very helpful feature when too much dust in unit, and again its a snap to open and fairly easy to clean. Set up is fairly easy and takes 15 minutes if you have a modest facility for tech -- software and gadgets. The setting menus that you view on your computer ( where you store the data files, linked to the scanner,) are only average, could be better to navigate, but the functions are few and fairly simple, so its not a big issue. A very good future, and one that validates DIY on scanning, is that its lets you set up a very detailed file directory when you scan the images, and i don't see how you could do this with 000's of files made outside. I havent precisely worked the economics but seems like if you have 1000-2000 photos or more and you want good quality scans, the Epson its worth it.

I have mountains of albums and tubs of pictures that have to go. This scanner absolutely meets my expectations and needs. Once I stack the photos and press Scan, it blows through the stack, does the enhancements I have asked for on each photo, and stores the photos where I want them. (I could chose one or more of a file folder in the file system, iPhoto, or a cloud service like Google Drive or DropBox.) I especially like that I can describe each stack (or add a new stack to the description I just used) so that even as I scan I am starting to get organized. OK, the enhancements aren't ALWAYS perfect. But 19 out of 20 times the enhanced scan looks lots better than my original. You can choose (and EPSON recommends) to keep both the original scanned picture and the enhanced version - on my photos from the 80s and 90s the enhancements work so well that I have dropped automatically keeping the originals. I was careful to check before I bought that my rather old Mac was supported. It is. Downloading and installing the software went very smoothly, and the set-up was easy for me to understand and use. I also like that the scanner itself is compact and has very few buttons. Although I consider carefully before buying this scanner (there are lots of less expensive ones) I don't regret a single $ that I spent, and would warmly recommend it to other non-professionals like me who just want to get all those piles of old paper stuff tidied away, without losing any good memories. The automatic feed is amazing.

Looked at several reviews and U-tube videos, prior to purchasing. Scanner works fast & pictures scanned are good quality. This scanner can do 300 dpi & 600 dpi scans. There is no discernible difference in the old photos from 300 dpi to 600 dpi, so I used the 300 dpi scans, which saves on file size space. Surprised how well that the auto-correction works on old faded colors! Nice features that are easy to switch between. Can set up to automatically give a scan of original, with an adjusted photo, and backside with writing all in single scan. Groups of photos in stacks rapidly go through scanner at less than 1 second each. The files are in jpg, and are sequenced, such as 100, 100a, and 100b when scanned with original, corrected photo, and the backside scan. The only disadvantage is that you cannot name a new folder on each group of photos. This is not too much of a problem though. Just need to create folders, and move from "scanned folder", into the folders that you create. For the original files names, the program had a prefix on the files such as "fast-foto100.jpg". The program allows you to setup so it will sequence like "100.jpg" instead. Once set up, the software automatically sequences incrementally all future photo scans. When you are going through many old photos; it is important that you clean the scanner often with the included wipes, and use canned air for dust particles to insure quality scans.

This unit has some great features if you want to quickly scan tax documents. However, it is useless for getting a good-quality photo scan. I am a professional photo historian and graphic designer who scans and archives clients' photos for a living. I will only scan images as TIFFs to avoid compression artifacts. When choosing the TIFF option in the Epson 2 driver, I can see visible compression damage in the scan as if it were a lower-quality jpeg. TIFF uses lossless compression and I should not be seeing any visible artifacts. Comparison tests on both platforms and scanning high-quality original photographic prints confirm this. The TIFF option is actually scanning the file as a low-quality JPEG and then saving it as a TIFF file, which gives me a larger file but not higher quality! I called Epson about this issue and was told that this $700 scanner is made for speed, not quality, so I shouldn't expect good photo scan quality. I have a 10-year-old Epson flatbed that gives me beautiful TIFFs. For that matter, so does my $50 Canon flatbed. Epson should not be selling this as a photographic scanner.