There are tons of scanners out there and they all have their pros and cons.  When you have a LOT of pictures to scan, you want to focus on two things: the speed it takes to complete a scan, and the quality of the scan.

Up until recently I’ve used flat bed scanners to scan pictures. Yes, I’m old school.  It’s a pain to line up things on a flat bed scanner, and then sit there spending more time cropping corners when inevitably something doesn’t scan in just right.

Alas, those days are over.   Scanning technology has advanced to the point where the average consumer can use an ADF, or Automatic Document Feeder, based scanner and get photo quality scans really really FAST.  How fast?  How about 1 second per scan!

Who makes such a beast?   Why none other than Epson.  Epson has been in the printing and scanning business for quite some time.  While there are imperfections in their software UI designs, their hardware usually makes up for that.  I have a project coming up where I will be utilizing their FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo and Document Scanning System to digitize hundreds of old photos and I can’t wait to put it through it’s paces.  When that project is done, I will be utilizing it as a replacement desktop document scanner to archive some old files.

With the wireless connectivity, that means I can put it on a table and spread out my workload and keep track of what was already scanned, and what’s left to be done.  There is plenty of resolution packed in for archiving documents (600dpi), or even 1200dpi if anything needs to be scaled.  It will even detect if there is something written on the back of a picture or document and scan it in a single pass.

At $599.99 retail, the FastFoto FF-680W can be a bit pricey, but in my view time is money and if something is going to save me an immense amount of time, I will definitely weigh that into my purchase decision.  If the FastFoto FF-680W is something you might be interested in, you can use our Amazon affiliate link to help us evaluate more products that make your life easier.

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