Epson - FastFoto FF-640 High-speed Photo Scanning System - Black

Amazing right out of the box! My husband who isn't very techy surprised me for Christmas by buying and setting it up on his own-that in itself is amazing! Some of the pictures we put in were in a very aged state-yellowed and faded, miraculously FastFoto gave us the option of three photos to download. We had so much fun with family on Facebook posting some Really old pics- from the 40's and 50's! FastFoto nailed it! I had a cow when I saw my cc bill, but have totally gotten over that after seeing the results. I can't wait to rebuild my wedding album!

This scanner can turn out pictures of high quality in no time flat. It's the third scanner in our home, but the first two took soooooooo...... long. I can finally get my huge picture project done.

The Epson FastFoto ff-640 is awesome. It creates perfect images of your printed photos and as the name suggests, it is fast. It can feed a stack of pictures and name the created files per the naming format you set up. My document scanner took 3 minutes per photo to become a jpg and the quality was not the best. This machine takes 2 or 3 seconds and the result is perfect.

Few years ago I told my mom that I should scan one day her box of family pictures for preserving them in the event of fire or other natural disaster. We have backup now everywhere for everything, but these old precious photos are the only copy that exists. If something happens, then they are gone forever. For this reason, I always wanted to have a digital backup of them, but I never found the energy and the time to scan them all with a flatbed scanner. Here comes Epson to the rescue with a new super fast and small scanner - the FastFoto FF-640. Not only is it very fast, but also very simple to use. First let me tell you about the setup process. Getting your scanner ready takes only few minutes. You take out of the box, remove all the protective packaging and go to the website written on the quick guide for downloading the scanner software. Since I’m using a Mac computer with this scanner, I downloaded the Mac version. On that page, there are few short videos that I highly suggest you watch. They only take few minutes and you will not only know quickly how to use your new scanner, but also what to do with special photos and documents. During the setup of the software you will be prompted to plug the USB cable and the power cable. Fortunately, the power cable is not a wall wart plug, so you won’t have any difficulties to find a free socket for it. Thanks Epson for that! :) Setup up process is already finished. The software I downloaded installed few applications that I had to update. For scanning photos, the main application is FastFoto. From that application you will be able to personalize few settings, which include uploading all your photos to cloud storage. I did not have great success with Google Drive, but with Dropbox it worked perfectly. I will need to check more deeply why I could not get it working with my Google Drive. That’s the only two cloud storage that it does support for now. By default, the scanner will scan your picture at 300dpi. That’s the dpi they use when mentioning 30 pictures in 30 seconds. I was wishing I could scan at a higher dpi without losing too much speed. Fortunately, you can change that setting for higher 600 dpi and it will still be very fast. At that higher dpi, it will take about 90 seconds for 30 pictures. I’m very impressed! Finally, I took my first pile of pictures, sorted them and gave a quick dust off with one of the two included microfiber cloths. Later, I will be using the second one for cleaning the inside of the scanner. You will notice after many scanned pictures a notification from FastFoto app that it’s time to clean the inside of the scanner. It scanned my first pile of picture as fast as mentioned. Then, I continued with another pile and so on. Out of 1500 scanned pictures, I only had 1 paper jam and it was in fact my fault. Some pictures I had were very thick. For this kind of picture, you have to use the switch on the left of the scanner. When the switch is at the up position, it can scan thicker pictures and the carrier sheet. The provided carrier sheet is useful for those very small pictures, like the passport ones. Epson said to use the carrier sheet for pictures smaller than 3x5, but I scanned many smaller ones perfectly without using it. Only for the very small ones (1 inch x 1 inch) I needed the carrier sheet. Finally, don’t forget to switch back the switch to the down position when you continue to scan a pile of normal pictures. Otherwise, it might grab two pictures at the same time. After you are done with that photo scanning task, you might think you will not be using that scanner so often as we don’t have much new paper pictures these days. Well, let me tell you that this scanner is also an excellent document scanner for everyday use. I personally use it for scanning my documents and my invoices. You know, you always keep them for warranty purpose but when comes the time you need it, it got erased. The ink they use on those invoices doesn’t last long. Well, now as soon as I have a new invoice, I scan it in PDF format with my Epson FastFoto scanner. Also, it is easier for me to find it back when needed. For that purpose, as well as for scanning any document, Epson installed two software – Epson scan and Document capture. Personally, I prefer Epson scan app because I can scan without being in front of the computer using only the scanner physical button. I could not get that with the Document capture app as I had to press the scan button inside the application. Also, it can scan both sides of the sheet in one shot. And if it’s blank, it can ignore it. Definitely, Epson thought about everything here. Super! I have one quick useful tip for you. By default, the scanner is always set to stay on until you manually turn it off. But inside the Configuration Epson Scan app, you can change the value of this function. I changed mine to 60 minutes of inactivity. I don’t have anymore to bother turning it off when not using it. Overall, I’m impressed by this scanner. In one evening I scanned more than 1500 pictures of different sizes and thickness. For scanning photos, you won’t find a better scanner than this one. It does exactly what it promised and it does it overall quite well. Plus, you can continue to use this scanner as a normal one for your day to day scanning. I highly recommend it. This is my review for the Epson FastFoto 640 that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review.

This scanner is a little pricey, coming in at just under $600 on sale, but it does exactly what it says that it will do. No tricks or hidden monthly plans (as with the Neat scanner), and they are not exaggerating about the speed. It scans a stack of up to 30 photos in about 30 seconds. The system requires that you install software on your computer (easy installation on my Mac), which controls the scan process. It appears that it must be hooked up to the computer via a printer cable - as I could find no wi-fi option. When you scan a set of photos, it will give you the options of 300 or 600 dpi, automatic picture restoration, line removal, file format and naming. One interesting option sets detection levels for information printed on the back of the photo. If the scanner sees something back there that is dark enough, it will scan it and name it after the picture with an "a" after it. As with any photo enhancement, it will save a copy of the original picture, just in case you want to keep it. It also ask you to set the year, month (or season), title text and number scheme. It also offers to create a subdirectory for the current scan. The information is written to the file name and numbered accordingly. Finally, it will continue to add scans to the current batch until you tell it that you are done. Overall, this is a great piece of very specialized scanning equipment that is just the thing if you have thousands of old family photos to scan.

I have been wanting to scan my family photo albums into digital form for years, but on a flatbed scanner it would take ages to do one by one and having to tweak each one with an editing program. Its just too much time, and thats why it hasn't got done. The Epson Fastfoto 640 lives up to its name. It scans photos incredibly fast. Just a second to scan each photo. The FF-640 unit itself is compact and fits on your desk easily - its much more compact than a flatbed scanner. You can fit over two dozen photos in the feeder at a time and it will automatically scan them - and even scan the back of them if you'd like! This is a very handy feature when names or locations were written on the back years ago. Epson has been making scanners for decades, so its no surprise their hardware is top notch. However thats only half of the equation. I'd like to speak about their Software now, which is the critical part that makes this scanner a worthy purchase. Scanning software is all too often a secondary thought for hardware manufacturers with few options besides scanning an image and saving it as a jpg. Epson here shows the depth of their experience by including very smart features in their software, which will streamline scanning of old photos into streamlined digital albums. The software is not like photoshop with a million options you don't need or understand. It simply asks you where it should save the images on your computer, what enhancements it should do to your photos such as restoring faded colors (critical for bringing old pictures to life), removing red eye, and auto-enhance, which helps fix photos which have exposure problems, which lots of old photos do. It has two options for scanning resolution, 300 and 600 DPI (dots per inch). What this means is that you can scan 4x6 photos at the higher resolution and then print new, fixed copies at 8x10 or larger. This is a great way to make fresh new enlargements from cherished childhood memories. I've already taken a faded 4x6 from my parents wedding and turned it into a beautiful wedding anniversary present for them. For the savvy folks, the software also has the ability to upload all the scans directly to your Dropbox or Google Photos account. This is the way to share your scans with family all over the world easily. It also scans documents just as fast. You can scan sheets of writing in just a blink of the eye, and it outputs them as searchable PDF files. You can use the included OCR software to turn written word into computer text even. I think the Epson FastFoto FF-640 is the perfect scanner for anyone who is looking to digitize a lot of photos in a little time. This is a review for the Epson FastFoto 640 that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review.

As the name states this is a (super) fast photo scanner. And when I mean fast, I mean FAST. The quality of the scans is great and while I'm no visual aficionado I liked the auto enhancement corrections it made. Within 10 minutes I was up and running. I scanned a ton of old photos I have had boxed up for years. It handled mix matched photos very well. It only jammed on me on two instances: 1) being photos stuck to each other (the photos did not get damaged by during the jam BTW) and 2) when a couple mini wallets made it in my pile that I didn't know about. Cons: 1) The price is high, IMO needs to be around the $400 mark to compete with the Fujitsu. 2) The scan/edit software has some usability issues that need to be addressed (ie zoom resetting). I'm not expecting Lightroom type features, but they need to tweak what's available for the person who's scanning hundreds of photos at a time and who only wants to spend about 5 seconds per photo to make a couple of very quick and simple corrections. (skew, cropping, zooming, cropping carrier sheet scans into multiple pictures). 3) At this price point I would also expect better document scanning features/software. You can scan multiple bills/documents at one time, but there's no quick and easy way to distinguish the separate items and file them separately accordingly. This is a review for the Epson FastFoto 640 that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review.

With photo searching and cataloguing options becoming so exciting these days, it’s a shame to have all those memories locked away in print form where they can’t be easily re-discovered, shared, and enjoyed. That’s where Epson’s FastFoto FF-640 comes in. What once seemed like a daunting task—scanning hundreds of old photos—has been turned into a quick and painless procedure. It’s even sort of *fun*. The FastFoto FF-640 is compact, wickedly fast, and smart. I was scanning my first photo batch within ten minutes of opening the box, and the one-touch operation made it possible for me to get my grandparents involved in digitally archiving our photos. Two features in particular stand out to me. The first is the scanner’s intelligent FastFoto software assistant that pops up when you press the scanning button. It makes it easy to designate batches of photos, sorting and naming them according to your preferences to make it easier to file them away correctly. Second, the FastFoto will automatically detect the presence of written or printed text on the backs of photos and scan both sides of a photograph when it does. You can even adjust how sensitive it is to make sure it’s only scanning actual messages and not photo paper logos! I should also point out that this makes a terrific document scanner. It can chew through a pile of old tax records or bills in seconds, leaving you with a tidy little PDF file that it assembles itself. It even corrects skewed pages, enhances text, and can automatically upload scans to Dropbox or Google Drive for you. In short, the Epson FastFoto FF-640 is the most capable scanning solution I’ve ever used. It doesn’t take up a lot of space on a desk, it’s almost unbelievably fast, and best of all it operates quietly. It’s just as convenient and immediate as using your phone, but with no compromise in scan fidelity. Please note: this is a review for the Epson FastFoto 640 that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review.