Customer Ratings & Reviews

When you're scanning pictures, most automatically loaded scanners are extremely harsh on photographs. This one is much more gentle with photos and designed specifically to scan, process, and name sets of photos. I presume that's what makes this scanner expensive. I expect preservable photo scans for large sets of photos. They are not high definition, hand processed photos, however. That requires that you scan the photo on a flatbed at a high resolution and then process it with a program like Adobe (I use ACDSee). You put in your photos, set your naming parameters on the interface screen (I don't use the harware buttons), and hit the scan button. It can scan one side, or both. You can have it scan the back if it detects any writing or printing to preserve a back scan with its front -- excellent for true archiving. Pictures with the sky at the top do tend to have a couple of slight verticle lines from it. I presume it's because the glass isn't perfectly clean. You should clean the glass every time to get the cleanest possible image I've found. Just get a glass wipe like the one I use for eye glasses that come in individual packs and rub the two glass surfaces and let them dry. The numbering system at it's most complete setting gives you a number with a name set (like Christmas1999), then uses "a" for the enhanced photo, and "b" for the back of the photo. You get something like Christmas1999_001, Christmas1999_001a, Christmas1999_001b. In the browser that comes with the program you can click a button to see the original scan, or the enhanced version, or both. You can't do this in other picture viewers. If you find you want to rename pictures, it is cumbersome because you can't just mass rename if you want to preserve the front, enhanced, and backside nomenclature. My main problem is that you can only scan in JPEGS, which is a lossy format (i.e. you lose information when you resave it under another name). I've read that there is a way to trick the scanner into saving into another file format, but I'm fine with jpegs because I consider my scans as digital thumbnails. If I really want a better scan of a picture, I will scan it on a flatbed scanner in a lossless format like TIFF. I think the hard part is mass scanning after organizing the photos. Once I can see all of the photos digitally, I can go back and scan individually. Price is the biggest hurdle in purchasing this product -- $600. But to get pictures delicately scanned, there isn't any other cheaper alternative. You can scan each picture by hand, but that's extremely tedious. This does it quickly, efficiently, with an excellent naming system.

Scans a photo a second - Both sides. Perfect for the wife who has saved every picture taken since high school. Makes sharing pictures when the kids want pictures of themselves as kids a breeze. Easy to operate - a bit pricey but there is nothing like the speed and convenience

So far, it is working well. Pictures scan quickly and the quality is better than the flatbed scanner it replaces. It scanned documents well though I have not tried to convert to text. I don't have much need for that. I thought I would need to keep the flatbed scanner for times when I need to scan from a book, but should be able to just take a photo of a page with my phone or other camera.

I'm at an age where having photos on paper was the only way to keep pictures. Therefore, with 8 HUGE containers of photos & wanting to downsize, I knew I needed to save them on my computer or to a USB drive & not spend a fortune having someone do it. The FastFoto delivered as promised and was so easy to use. My saved photos look better than the originals as there many ways to set up the machine to eliminate red eye, bad exposure etc. The FastFoto was well worth the money spent & I have told many people about it.

I was very reluctant to spend what seemed like an absorbent amount of money on this single purpose scanner, although the independent reviews were positive. We purchased the scanner believing that if it did not live up to expectations that we could always return it to Best Buy. The scanner performed as promised and made quick work of many photos. The device worked well with my MacBook Pro. While I still believe that the scanner is over-priced it certainly delivered on its purpose. We are well satisfied with this scanner

It scans quickly, even at 600 dpi, and it picks up good details. However, the images were almost all over saturated, and you will need to lighten the shadows and adjust the midtones. It did a good job of staying jam-free, with the exception of ultra glossy surface photos. It's important to note if it does jam, it takes literally a second to pop the cover open and just restack the pile, then hit Continue. It's also neat that you can choose for it to print both sides if there's text on the back and it will know to do that automatically when text appears, and not scan the back if there isn't any text. Neat feature! (You select the darkness of print which you want it to notice. If you don't want faded text printed, you can choose medium or dark text.)

Excellent scanning of stacks of old photo’s. I was impressed with built-in software that improves image and color quality of old photo’s.

I am still going through the process of learning this scanner, but so far I am extremely pleased. It is just as fast as advertised and the scanned images are very crisp and clear. I have thousands of photos that I want to digitize and I think this will allow me to accomplish this with minimal pain and give me the quality for which I'm looking. I will update this review once I am more proficient with the software.

I had been using a flatbed photo scanner that was great quality but not so easy to scan hundreds and maybe thousands of old photos I want to save to digital photo albums. My flatbed scanner did not come with a filing system so it made it even more frustrating. My new EPSON FastFoto ff-640 is amazing and so fast! It has an easy to use filing program to set up all the many different albums you want. You just select an album from the drop down which took me a few tries to figure it out (only flaw). Just click all the way to the right of the drop down empty box and then your already stored albums will then appear. Other then that minor flaw in the program I love this scanner. I will be scanning all of my photo albums in my spare time so my many photos will be saved for my children. I was able to scan old photos of my grandparents from the 1940's and earlier that were passed down to me. The key is to put your photos in piles by categories like person, place and year so when you scan that pile of photos at once you can put them all directly in the correct folder you make right then or select a folder from the drop down you have already made. I also purchased the Best Buy 2 year Protection Plan because Best Buy will replace it if it breaks and with all the photos I have to scan I wanted to make sure I can get a replacement if something happens to it especially because of it being so expensive. If you are looking for a really high resolution scanner for newer photos then maybe use a flatbed scanner. But for older photos like I am scanning the higher resolution is not needed.

The FF-640 is a pretty well designed scanner with one specific use in mind - to mass-scan plenty of snapshots that may have accumulated in drawers and shoeboxes over the years. Sure, you can send your pictures out to a service for this kind of thing, but having the scanner at hand makes it a lot easier to just find and work on whatever batches you may have at a give time. The scanner can scan either 300 or 600 dpi, and can scan the back and front together (great to capture whatever scribbles are on the back of the photo to later enter into whatever photo organization software you might use).You can also set it to generate a corrected version of the front scan; this does a pretty good job removing red-eye and enhancing colors and contrast when the original snapshot is faded. It's not perfect, but certainly saves a lot of time. Workflow-wise, you can scan up to 30 prints at one feeding, but if you have a stack of 150 prints then after each 30 you can simple click "continue" after inserting the next group and go as long as you like. If you opt for both front/back and the corrected version, the output files (which you can name whatever you like plus the auto-incrementing number applied by the FF-640 software) are numbered "NAME-0123a, NAME-0123b and NAME-0123c, the "c" version being the back scan and the "b" version being the corrected version. After scanning in a gaggle of shots, I import them into Lightroom (I bemoan the loss of Aperture - thanks again, Apple!) and then select which version I like better (original or corrected - it usually runs to 75% of the time the corrected version is nicer) as well as copying whatever notes were on the back to the comment section of the image file. This way, I delete 2 of the 3 JPG files. Contrast this to hand-scanning 150 snapshots with a normal flatbed scanner - either you have to place each one individually on the glass, or you have to manually "cut apart" the group you may lay out all at once. Either way, a time consuming PITA. I would have given it 5 stars, but the software is a little wonky (at least on a Mac) - first, after a few calls to support (which, by the way, was quite excellent) we figures out that you cannot have another scanner powered up when you boot up the FF-640 software, as it gets confused. In my case, I have a general-purpose Epson NX-420 printer/scanner, which seemed to be the root of my initial problems. But having learned that little tidbit, I have no issues. Well, other than the strange behavior of the FF-640 software auto-loading when I restart the Mac - I cannot find where to change that (it's not in the setup windows) so now I just know I have to manually quit the software after rebooting my machine for whatever reason. So this is a very good purpose-built machine; if, like me, you have hundreds (thousands?) of snapshots from over the decades and want to digitize them (and even make use of today's software's ability to do facial recognition, so you can group together all of the photos with Aunt Zelda in them!) - which also means you can make backups and all that as well as share them with family, you will likely make good use of the FF-640.

Epson FF-640 is a fast document and photo scanner in quantities. It has excellent resolution and can be increased from 300dpi to 600dpi. The only items it cannot scan are pages from books, passport, magazines, etc. since it will need a flat bed scanner for those items.

A very Fast scanner perfect for scanning those old photos from your childhood. You do have to clean it frequently though to avoid any lines in your pictures.

I love this scanner. It is so fast, and produces excellent quality scans. My brother and I had to go through hundreds of family photos to put together a powerpoint presentation for an event, and the FastFoto allowed us to completely the project quickly and easily. The resulting slideshow was just beautiful.

I love this Scanner. The speed is great, but better yet, it saves 2 types of photos, the Original and the Enhanced version. The Enhanced version is so good, it fixes all of the photos without have to go individually to each one. Almost any size fits. the drawback of course, you have to remove a lot of photos from your existing albums and put them back in afterward.

I have tons of family photos that I have been organizing and digitizing. This scanner has made this task a breeze! Pricey, but we'll worth it.

Had to scan hundreds of photos from an estate for a memorial service. This scanner made that possible. It is fast, reliable, and brilliant

Scanned a couple batches of old photos so far and love it. Scans front & back simultaneously. Great to see handwritten notes! Fast device.

The hardware is excellent, with accurate details and colors and reliable feeding (as long as you sort the inputs by size). I have only been using it for a couple of weeks, but I have done around 1500 photos, mostly snapshots but a few larger prints. I use the 600 dpi setting, even though this higher setting doesn't get much more detail, so I know that my archive has every bit of information from the photo. Storage for the larger files is cheap and it still only takes a few seconds to scan each photo. It takes me longer than that to sort the photos for input and to file them. The FastFoto software (available for download) is easy and produces OK results if the originals are good but, for old photos, the fade and color restoration feature is weak and usually results in excessive contrast and loss of highlights and shadows. Epson also makes available a separate document scanning package with OCR and a more flexible (but more cumbersome) photo scanner program, but I just tried those a time or two before I gave up on the Epson software and reverted to VueScan from Hamrick Software. I am quite pleased with the results from this combination.

We have literally thousands of pictures in albums that we want to convert to digital. After much research we chose this model. You can stack up a lot of pictures and they automatically feed and get scanned into your computer. Easy to use, works great and can do the backside if you want to save any writing on the back.

This scanner has made a huge project of converting old family photos to digital copy a quick and easy process.