Share mattcorkum's profile
mattcorkum
mattcorkum's stats
- Review count1
- Helpfulness votes8
- First reviewOctober 29, 2016
- Last reviewOctober 29, 2016
- Featured reviews0
- Average rating4
Reviews comments
- Review comment count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First review commentNone
- Last review commentNone
- Featured review comments0
Questions
- Question count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First questionNone
- Last questionNone
- Featured questions0
Answers
- Answer count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First answerNone
- Last answerNone
- Featured answers0
- Best answers0
mattcorkum's Reviews
Make digital copies of treasured photographs or important documents with this Epson FastFoto photo scanner. Red-eye removal and color enhancement tools let you quickly touch up scanned images for optimal results. This Epson FastFoto photo scanner has a maximum optical resolution of 600 dpi to ensure accurate electronic reproduction.
Customer Rating
4
Incredibly Fast Scanner
on October 29, 2016
Posted by: mattcorkum
The Epson FastFoto FF-640 is an incredibly fast scanner with simple but effective software. If you have lots of photos to scan, this is the scanner to buy. No more lifting the cover of a flatbed scanner, lining things up, doing a scan preview and then scanning. Simply place a stack of up to 30 photos in the scanner and hit scan.
Setup of the device itself is incredibly simple. Plug in the power and USB cables and you’re done.
The software can be downloaded as one package that includes a few apps and the drivers. It is all very straightforward. Thinking about folks who aren’t as computer savvy, I think they could easily navigate the install, setup and scan process without issue.
The scanner is incredibly fast. We’re talking 1 second per photo! I can’t get over it. I chose 600ppi (vs. the default of 300ppi) and it still flew through them in no time. The first batch I did was 57 photos and it took 2 minutes, including time waiting for me to load the second stack.
You can stack up to 30 photos at once and you can mix 4x6 and 5x7 photos. It also expands to accept 8x10 and even letter-sized documents.
By default, the scanner is set to 300ppi and JPEG. The only real change you can make is to 600ppi - you can’t scan to any other format, like TIF or DNG. Changing from 300ppi to 600ppi increases the scan time of each image, but it is already so fast, this minimal increase makes no difference to me and I’d rather have the best quality I can get.
It CAN do 1200ppi and it can save as TIF, but not with the FastFoto software. You can use the included Epson Scan software to access those options, but you lose some of the great options of the FastFoto software. Also, the Epson Scan software is not Retina-enabled so on my 5k iMac it looks fuzzy. It still works though!
Speaking of the FastFoto software, it is incredibly simple to use. You can define a year, date and subject for the bath of photos. It will automatically create filenames using that information. It will also create a subfolder for each batch if desired. Lastly, it can apply some “fixes” to the images - mostly colour cast / white balance. It can save these as separate files, leaving your originals intact, and appending “_a” to the end of the file names. The downside to this is that if you want to delete the original or the _a version, you have to do this manually in Finder on the Mac - there is no built-in photo viewer with the Mac version of the software. With the Windows version, there is a photo viewer and it makes it easier to select and delete files. As it stands, I tried the auto correction and didn’t like it, so I will just be leaving it off.
This is an expensive unit, make no mistake. However, I would NEVER consider doing more than a few photos using a flatbed scanner. You need something like this unit unless you have days and weeks to spend scanning each photo individually. Also, many places charge upwards of $1 per photo to scan a batch and often there is a minimum of a few hundreds. You can easily come out ahead using a unit like this, especially if you went splits with family members or friends.
This is a review for the Epson FastFoto 640 that I received free of charge to do a beta test and review. Overall, this is a fantastic product. It is incredibly fast and easy to use. I will be using it to digitize hundreds of photos and I look forward to it. To receive a perfect score, I would like to see the price come down a little bit, and I would like to see 1200ppi and TIF/DNG options with the FastFoto software.
I would recommend this to a friend!
Share this review:
+2points
8of 14voted this as helpful.
mattcorkum's Review Comments
mattcorkum has not submitted comments on any reviews.
mattcorkum's Questions
mattcorkum has not submitted any questions.
mattcorkum's Answers
mattcorkum has not submitted any answers.