Negatives and slides (the Epson does not have film-handling capability).Pictures still in their frames (see above).Photos mounted on thick cards or boards (won’t fit in the scanner).Polaroids (too thick for the Epson’s feed design).I continue to use my flatbed Canon Canoscan 8400F for other originals: In my mind, it’s perfect for the photo collector who doesn’t need advanced photo handling software. I was worried that I was sacrificing scanning quality for speed, but the Unsharp Mask setting in the Advanced tab of the Epson Scan 2 program does a good job of keeping photo scans sharp. I’ve heard the scans from the Epson FF-640 will be soft. The Epson Scan 2 software will allow you to set the start number, in my case P03221, and will remember to count consecutively for all future scans. After 3200 scans, I didn’t want to have to start a new system at “P00001”. Will the Epson FF-640 let me continue with my number system? I have a collection of scans with unique ID numbers already. The Epson will scan a whole stack of photos 2-sided, and the scans will be consecutively ordered. That’s a lot of work when you’re facing thousands of scans, so many people opt to skip scanning the backs, or try to capture all the information when naming the scan, e.g., – Christmas at Kingsland Restaurant with Fred and Wilma Wong, John and Janet Koreman, the Tang family, Vancouver, BC P00425. It’s an important consideration for the would-be archivist – how to keep the information on the backs of the photos? With my flatbed scanner, I’d have to scan, open the scanner & flip the photo, scan again, and then make sure to tag the scans so that they’d be consecutively ordered. I have photos with important information on the back. Batches of 30 photos scanning at 300 dpi will be scanned in 22-25 seconds. How fast is fast?įast. After doing a few series of test scans, I started loading photos into the automatic feed tray (the ADF). This is a known issue for Epson, but not for me, because I will not be using the scanner over a network. The only hitch was when the software checked for updates, and the Windows firewall blocked the Epson Event Manager from fully installing. When I repeated the process on my PC, I found the setup much more fluid and automatic. Epson will advise you not to do anything else while it performs this manoeuvre, which gives you plenty of time to admire the GUI (graphical user interface – the equivalent of the rotating blue dot). This is a shot of the screen I got to look at for ages while Epson searched for a firmware update. The Mac installation wasn’t difficult, but it was clunkier and seems to be missing the FastFoto software. It was easier to set up on a PC than a Mac. I’ve been using the Epson Scan 2 software. It broke down like this: MacBook Air running OS 10.13 Epson doesn’t support all platform equally. Software, but what is offered will depend on your hardware and OS setup. Not shown: two microfibre cleaning cloths. All rights reserved.įrom top, clockwise: scanner and document tray scanner power cord USB cord quick start instructions and warranty carrier sheet. All of those originals were scanned at higher resolutions, which slows a scanner down.īut still. Some needed special handling and cleaning. My previous sessions included working with slides, negatives, and delicate, old photos. There are a couple of caveats, of course. Put another way, I achieved in one afternoon (4.5 hours) the output of 10 months. That’s the equivalent of 10 scanning sessions with my flatbed scanner. On my first day of scanning, I tallied 1023 images. The ads say it will scan documents at 45 ppm (pictures per minute). It’s a hard copy scanner, for documents and photos. It was pricey – I got it for $700 on a holiday sale at Staples. A high speed scanner that is built to scan photos from 3×5″ to 8×10″ is the machine of my dreams. I have 8000+ more to scan, but they are all prints from ~1970-2000. I’d spent 2.5 years carefully scanning 3000 slides, negatives and fragile old photos. That’s a big promise, but does it deliver? Why consider a high speed photo scanner?Īs soon as I saw the ad for the Epson FF-640, I knew it was the scanner for me. I thought I’d share my thoughts about the new Epson photo scanner – billed as being the fastest photo scanner on the market today.
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