Most Helpful Positive Review
Finally - A Fast Photo Scanner That Makes Scanning Fun!
My family is large - seven children and thirteen grandchildren. Family moments and the thousands of photos that were born from those family moments are very precious. We’ve had several wildfire near misses, as our home is right up against a hillside. So, I have wanted to scan the 10,000 or so photos we’ve collected over the years to prevent loss from a disaster, like a fire or flood, and also to save these wonderful memories before the fading photo paper and color degradation (due to the use of inferior quality processing materials) threaten to destroy them forever. Several years ago, I bought an all-in-one printer and decided to make use of the flatbed scanner to start on my ambitious photo preservation plan. I was able to get up to four, sometimes five photos on the scanner bed at a time, but the repetitive, time-consuming, and laborious process of arranging the photos on the scanner, waiting for the scanner to do its very slow pass, and then use the software that came with the printer ‘ scanner to separate the 4-5 photos scanned and straighten and orient them properly wore down my resolve, and after a few months of on-again off-again enthusiasm, I gave up. Now, about ten years later, I finally found the Epson FF-680W photo scanner with an auto-feeder. The FF-680W saved my photo archiving dreams and turned them into a reality. Right out of the box, I could tell it was a quality piece of scanning equipment. It feels solid, but it has a small form factor, which is a welcomed feature, as it takes up very little space on my already crowded work surface, but it’s productivity footprint is huge. My wife went to work, organizing all the photos by year to the best of her ability, as I followed behind, scanning each year’s photos as quickly as she finished each stack. The FF-680W greedily accepted each stack I fed it, scanning each photo with the quality I hoped for, but so much faster than I thought could realistically be achieved. In two weeks’ time, devoting between 3 and 5 hours each day, I scanned almost 10,000 photos, completely a years-long goal (finally), and it was not only painless - it was actually fun! The FF-680W is again both fun and easy to use. And, it comes with a simple to use but very powerful software application to help manage the process with very little effort. The software is smart enough that, if you finish scanning a large stack of photos from a particular year and move on to another year’s photos, but later find more prints from a year you already scanned, there’s no need to worry. Just feed the straggler prints into the feeder, push the scan button and select the year of the photos. The software then looks at the contents of the directory for the year you selected, recognizes that there are already other photos that you’ve previously scanned to that directory and continues numbering sequentially, adding them to the group previously scanned, so you won’t end up with confusing scan numbering or multiple folders for scanned photos from 1978, for example. Given the fact that photo prints often curl or crease, before I began using the FF-680W I thought there was little chance that the feeder would perform well, but out of the thousands of photos that I scanned, many old and not in great auto-feed form, I only had a few misdeeds, and in not one of those misdeeds was it the printer’s fault. The photos that jammed were clearly in no shape to feed through, but because the scanner had fed so many poor condition prints previously, I guess I felt emboldened to push the feeder beyond a reasonable expectation. But, even then, the scanner caused no damage you the misfed photos. I can’t say enough great things about this fantastic photo scanner. The only thing that kept me from buying it sooner was the price. Let’s face it, this is not an inexpensive piece of equipment. But. After staring at the tall pile of boxes of photos for so many years, I finally took the plunge and bought it. Man, what the heck was I waiting for? I strongly recommend this scanner to anyone in a similar situation. Buy this life-saver, you will not regret it.