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.

Have thousands, upon thousands of pictures to scan.I choose this scanner for two reasons:a.) 600 dpi vs regular 300dpi of other sannersb.) Auto feederEver 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..

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.