How to scan thousands of Photos without losing your mind

In depth review and walk-through of the Epson Fastfoto FF-680W, the world’s fastest scanner. How to take a mountain of photos and scan then fast. Digitize your print photo collection and, declutter your life, tidy all your photos Marie Kondo style.

One thing that was dogging me for several years, was this box full of all my photos. When I thought about them, I felt a knot in my stomach, knowing that such a mammoth task was ahead of me.

Inside the giant plastic box, paper and plastic shopping bags full of envelopes and loose photos. Paper sleeves and envelopes of photos and postcards everywhere. This isn’t garbage either. These are my personal photos, my precious memories. As I get older, I realize how important these are. There are things that are front of mind and things that you know in the back of your mind. There there are things that you think you remember, or have completely forgotten. Your photos are like keys that unlock those memories and can transform you back in time and suddenly you remember things that you had completed forgotten, and could have been lost. This is why during disasters, one of the first things that people take with them are their photographs.

So I am facing the possibility of losing these photos, or at least, not being able to look at them easily. I had a dream of one day having them all scanned and safe in my computer. But how? The task seemed too big. I have a flatbed scanner, but this would take forever. There are services that you can use, but I didn’t want to risk shipping my photos and especially didn’t feel comfortable with strangers looking at my personal photos.

Enter the Epson FastFoto FF-680W. Claiming to be the fastest scanner in the world and able to quickly and easily scan, save and even enhance my photos for me. Ok, Epson, you have my interest. This review looks at my experience with this scanner. Most importantly, does it get the job done, meet my expectations and fulfill its promise. That promise, to digitize all my photos with good enough quality and with as small effort on my part as possible.

Here is how Epson describes the FF-680W

Using the Epson FF-680W

Check out the video review above to see it in action and also get an in-depth look at the software than comes with it, setup, see it in action and view the results.

You are able to connect wirelessly to your computer, so you can position the FF-680 on a dining room table and work comfortably. The FastFoto is able to scan multiple photos at once. You stack them up on the sheet feeder and it goes to work. The scanning speed is very fast, about a second per photo and you can scan at 300dpi, 600dpi 0r 1200dpi. I like that you can even stack photos of different sizes and it snaps them up quickly. In my test I scanned 2500 photos and not a single photo was damaged. I experienced only 2-3 jams and these were because the photos had stuck tougher. It was very easy to clear the jams, you just pop open the lid and lift them out, fortunately, you don’t have to drag your precious photos out of the mechanism. It’s also full duplex and able to scan both sides at the same time. You can even set it up to detect if there is any writing or notes on the back and only scan the backs with information present.

The quality was “good enough.” Let me explain. I wasn’t going into this, expecting a replacement for a high quality flatbed or drum scanner for professional use. I’m looking for consumer grade quality. I want the photos to be nice and clear, but these are my personal snapshots, not commercial photography and I set my expectations there. I had a fear that the quality might be really bad because of the speed. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the scans as well as the automatic enhancements applied by the bundled software.

Once thing to be aware of, Epson recommends that you clean the glass sensor and rollers every 300 scans or so. I noticed, if you fail to clean regularly, thin lines can appear on the scans because of the accumulated dust. The kit comes with a microfiber cloth to do said cleaning.

I did find that on certain photos, there were still some visible lines on some of the scans even after cleaning, but these are acceptable and easy enough to fix in Photoshop. The bundled software is impressive Epson Fast Photo and Smart Scan. As I mentioned, you can choose auto enhancements, which are examined in detail in my video, as well as examples of the scan quality.

You can also use the FF-680 W as a document scanner. It’s ridiculously fast. In document mode, it also scans back and front. It happens so fast, it’s amazing it can do both sides at that speed and the documents look really good.  It also has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and can turn a page of text into a typed MS word or Excel document in seconds.

Overall, I was really impressed with the Epson FF-680W and highly recommend it for someone who is looking to digitize and preserve their photographs. This tool takes a seemingly impossible task and makes molehills out of mountains. The feeling of accomplishment and peace of mind when you are done, is so good.

All of this does come at a price though, and you will be paying about $530 USD (Street Price. Suggested price $599) for this nifty device.

Get the scanner here: https://amzn.to/2BglmTk

So overall, I give the Epson FF-680W 4.5 our of 5 and highly recommend it. (If it were a little less inexpensive, I would award it 5 stars).

Thanks for checking out my review

Colin

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