[PLUG] scanning photo prints

[Erik Lane]

I had an Epson V- something. (Maybe 600, but the pictures don't look quite
right.)

This was probably 2007-8 or so. It did transparencies as well as
photographs. It did a good-enough job for my needs. It would work with
Linux, but the automatic color adjustments and AI-dust removal were
Windows-only. I'm sure pros would not have been satisfied with the
automatic features, but for my needs they were great.

However, the manual loading and unloading of the device were very tedious.
It took me many months to get through everything I had. (I was scanning
every family picture I could get my hands on from both my side as well as
my wife's. There were 10's of thousands.) However, I did it by simply
telling it to do its work and then coming back later and swapping things
out and setting it to run again. It would take something like 10-15 minutes
per batch of 6-12 pictures or whatever. So it wasn't speedy at all, but I
didn't care because it wasn't my time and I could get other things done.

I'm just saying that at that time my research told me that for my budget it
was the best I could get before moving to at least semi-pro devices that
were thousands of dollars. I think I paid maybe $400 at most? Anyway, that
ballpark. And actually it still works, as far as I know. A couple years ago
I got it out along with the Windows XP computer I keep just for it and sent
it off with my inlaws who had a pile of negatives and were asking me about
alternatives to paying large dollars to a professional service to digitize
them all. (And yes, they know to not connect it to the internet. But Epson
never supported any newer operating system with this scanner. Or at least
not for the automatic functions.)

So if your research is saying Espon, I would go with it. It must be an
enormous leap beyond what mine was, but in the end, I have everything
digitized, and the quality is plenty good for me, and now all these
irreplaceable photos are stored safely.

Good luck!
Erik

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 8:53 AM Galen Seitz <galens at seitzassoc.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm interested in hearing people's experiences scanning their photos.
> We have a large collection of old prints of various sizes, both B&W and
> color that we would like to digitize.  I checked the mailing list
> archives and was surprised that I couldn't find any previous discussion
> of this.  My product searches all seem to lead to the Epson FastFoto
> FF-680W.  This is a $600 photo scanner that can scan a stack of prints
> at 3 seconds per print.  Despite the high price and apparently
> Windows-only software, this seems to be the best choice for bulk
> scanning photos.  Does anyone have experience with this product or a
> similar product?
>
> BTW, in the future there may be a need to digitize slides, but for the
> time being my focus is on prints.
>
> thanks,
> galen
> --
> Galen Seitz
> galens at seitzassoc.com
>