#1:Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo and Document Scanning System, Black
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Customer reviews
Outstanding scanner, high-quality imaging that's fast and easy to use!
I ordered this Epson scanner to replace a Canon version that my Windows 11 system wouldn't recognize over USB. I initially had problems installing the software on one of my laptops (both laptops are Dell but for some reason one had issues with the software). Epson tech support helped me overcome the installation issues via email in just a couple of days and the scanner has worked perfectly ever since. The enhancement features of the software are especially nice, including image straightening and color/brightness correction, both of which work flawlessly. The scanner also automatically scans both sides of each photo, so if you have handwritten notes on the reverse side you'll have a record of those as well with no further effort. The user interface is simple and easy to understand and the scanning quality is excellent. Finally, the scanner is FAST, it takes only about 3 seconds per photo and it will autofeed up to 30 or so photos. If you are digitizing family albums of snapshots as I am, I can highly recommend this scanner as it will make short work of your scanning task!
UPDATE January 2025:
I am adding this update because this scanner continues to impress! I have now scanned well over 3000 snapshots, the majority the standard 4x6" size, but also other odd-shaped sizes, brochures, menus, and the like. I have never had any issues with streaks to the digital images or scratches/damage to the original photos. I have run combined stacks of photos of slightly different sizes (4x6, 3x5, 3.5x4.5) with no issues at all, as well as warped/bent photos, and the feeder just keeps running with great reliability. The imaging enhancement works especially dramatically on very old snapshots that have turned sepia-brown, with muddled colors. If you are contemplating using old snapshots in a memory/scrapbook application, you may want to consider scanning them with the FF-680W and reprinting them, it will add new life to your presentation!
Works Flawlessly -- By Far the Best Scanner I've Ever Used
This scanner completely lives up to its billing as "the world's fastest personal photo scanner." I had thousands of old photos that, because we're moving, I wanted to store electronically while throwing out the paper copies. After doing a fair amount of research, I landed on the Epson FastFoto 680W. It's pricier than some other scanners but well worth it. In two days, I scanned more than 4,000 photos without a hitch -- the scanner worked flawlessly across all different sizes of photos. It even enhanced the quality of the photos as I scanned them. One caveat: keep in mind that the super-fast scans (no more than a second per photo) produce photos that are 300 dots per inch; if you want to scan at a higher dpi, the scanner is a lot slower. As a result, I decided to keep copies of a handful of very special photos, while still being content to keep only digital versions of at least 95% of them. After scanning several thousand photos, I switched to document mode to scan hundreds of paper files that I also wanted to get rid of and it was even faster than it was for the photos because it scans even two-sided documents in no more than a second. My days of paper copies are finally over. In fact, I'm keeping the scanner on my desk so that every time I get a document that I want to save, I instantly scan it and then discard the hard copy of the document. Overall, this is one of the best products I've ever purchased and definitely the best scanner I've ever used.
Unfortunately, after I wrote that review, and for no apparent reason, the scanner suddenly stopped working with my computer (a fairly new iMac). The computer simply stopped recognizing the scanner and nothing could get it to work, even after I uninstalled and then tried to reinstall the software several times. The software won't re-install unless the computer recognizes the scanner, which it won't. And the Epson customer support people were no help at all. So, while this is a magnificent piece of hardware, the software seems like it's still a work in progress.
I'm updating my review to increase it to five stars. After the computer suddenly stopped recognizing the scanner, I finally tried replacing the cable connecting the scanner to the computer. Presto, the computer recognized the scanner again. So it wasn't the scanner that went bad; it was the cable that I was using. The scanner truly is phenomenal.
Excellent scanner
Very pleased with the quality and performance of the FF-680W scanner. It's fast, organizes photos by folders for easy sorting, has great resolution and the software is easy to use. Over 2,000 photo prints of various sizes scanned so far with no issues. Plus postcards, various documents. For my use it was well worth the money.
Super fast! The auto enhance feature is AMAZING!
I decided to digitize my family photos for my parents and siblings for Christmas.
At first, I was using a regular printer flatbed scanner but the quality of the scan was really poor. I tried putting pictures through the auto feed on it and they would stretch the picture and twist them to an angle as it fed them through. It was slow and I had to crop every single picture. It took FOREVER!
I started researching scanners and found this one. It seemed like a good one so I bought it.
The original scanner I was using was scanning the pics at 200 dpi. I figured out that I could have increased it to 300 dpi but that was it.
This scanner has a minimum of 300 dpi for photos and goes up to 1200 dpi. The pictures are so much better quality and it's so fast I was able to redo all the ones I had previously scanned in no time. Best of all, I didn't have to crop every single one!
I have some pictures that were really poor quality. The auto enhance feature on this scanner helps a lot. I'm able to save really dark pictures and it'll lighten them up to where you can actually see who is in them!
I will say that it doesn't like Polaroids. It thinks they are multiple pictures. Luckily I only have a few of these. I just put them in the sleave that's included for delicate pictures and they go through just fine. I do have to crop these photos though. This sleave works great for tiny pictures as well.
I was able to scan documents as well. You do have to download the Epson ScanSmart app for this. It took forever to figure this out as it isn't clear in the user manual. I thought you could just select ScanSmart in the Fast Photo app but it still scanned it as a jpg file. You have to actually download the ScanSmart app to scan a PDF or Word document. It has several other formats as well.
The ScanSmart app allows you to crop and straighten pages. This is so helpful for my family history pages. Sometimes they were slanted on the page because they'd been photocopied so many times. One included an inch or so of the next page, like they'd been copied from a book. I was able to crop this out and straighten the page before putting in it Word or PDF format. And if the pages are out of order you can drag them in order before putting them in whatever format you choose. Or if one was accidentally upside down you could correct this as well before selecting your format.
I love the duplex scanning feature for documents as well. It's so nice that it doesn't have to flip pages over like the regular printer scanners do. It just smoothly scans. And it's FAST!
I'm scanning my family history that was mostly typed on typewriters. It's cool that I can transform these into Word or PDF documents. The Word documents allow for editing which is nice because they are more legible and you can correct spelling and grammar while you're at it. It does require a lot of editing though because the auto character recognition doesn't always translate correctly. Not the fault of the technology but because these documents have been photocopied multiple times and sometimes c's look like o's, etc. Still, it's all worth the time to digitize these important memories.
This is worth the money for sure. I'm so happy I bought it!
Works perfect, fast and automatic editing
I'm scanning my pictures in small batches. The machine is small and compact about 12" x 6" so it doesn't take up a lot of space. I have not tempted fate by putting the maximum in the feeder. I'm making sure that photos are clean with no residue on them (comes with a cleaning cloth). The instructions say they can jam otherwise. I was pleasantly surprised to find it can scan larger and smaller pictures than the sizes advertised. It comes with a special clear sleeve to scan delicate and smaller pictures. I chose the automatic editing (as a copy) and I think it does a really good job. After each batch I check to make sure the orientation is correct and fix it if needed. It can scan a single picture as well. I do this when there is an odd size. I think the color and scanning quality is quite good. I have thousands of printed pictures to scan. It took me several hours to scan a thousand but I'm taking my time and precautions. It would cost a small fortune to do this through the service that you send them in. I like having the control myself over my photos. I don't have to worry about them getting lost in the mail. This way, I can back them all up to the cloud and never lose them and share them with family digitally. For me this is worth it. I plan to loan it out to other family members when done. It hasn't jammed or ruined any photos. It also says to clean the machine periodically so I plan to do that ever so often. I am just scanning to one folder and can organize later. This is brilliant and I'm very happy with this product.
Pricey Scanning Option But Worth The Investment
Like many others, I have boxes of old print photos that my family would love to have digitized to easily share and archive. I knew that using a traditional scanner like on an all-in-one printer would be painfully slow and frustrating for the volume, so I was willing to make the investment in the right tool for the job and after some research I settled on this Epson with many good reviews. It is not the cheapest tool to scan in old photos, but it is absolutely worth the investment when needing to scan in volume. The setup with my MacBook was super simple, just installed the software and plugged it in then it was up and running without any issues. After scanning my first stack of photos, I was blown away with how quick and simple it was compared to my past experience scanning with flatbed type scanners. It rolled right through the stack of photos in no time flat and when I reviewed them, every single scan was perfect, no weird errors, misfeeds, nothing. Most importantly the digital files looking perfect just letting the Epson software make the auto adjustments. Highly recommend.
Need to scan a lot of inherited photos?
I inherited several large 20+ gallon totes full of family photos when my last immediate family member passed away several years ago. My ultimate goal was to scan all the photos in so that I could have a digital copy of them and do *something* with all the totes of physical pictures. At first, I picked up a flat bed scanner off Craigslist but that turned out to be problematic and cumbersome. In order to get a several scanned in, I'd end up adding 30 minutes total to one scan because of all of the post photo editing that is needed to crop photos and re-adjust etc. After several hours and only managing to scan in maybe 50-100 photos, I gave up and put the totes aside until I could figure out a better alternative.
I researched photo scanning services and with as many photos as I have, it would not have been feasible. The most "economical" package I could find was to scan 200 photos and the cost would be in the ballpark of $500. Considering I would have well over 200 photos to scan, I could not, in my right mind, justify paying this much $ to have my photos scanned.
In one of my late night, "my brain won't slow down enough to fall asleep moments." I started researching "auto-feed" scanners and if something like this would be possible. This is how I came across the FastFoto 680W. I read the reviews on Amazon as well as other websites not related to Epson, I saw the pros and cons and decided that it would be worth investing in this scanner in order to get these numerous totes of photos scanned in.
The scanner arrived and I had issues setting the scanner up on our wifi. I followed the steps as instructed and still had issues setting up the scanner on wifi. Having the scanner setup via USB wasn't the best idea due to space on my desk and location of my computer equipment in my office. After uninstalling/reinstalling, coming across random "bummer" errors and just no luck, I called Epson and had them assist. Not sure what it was, but they had me walk through all of the steps I performed and re-performed and it set up just fine.
Once the scanner was setup, I was able to start scanning photos. I sorted through the photos and stacked them in similar photo sizes and time frames (or at least rough time frames). For the most part I haven't run into any issues scanning photos. Some of the photos I have from the 50's are are on thick card stock which will not process through the auto-feed scanner and will need to be scanned another way. I haven't specifically counted, but I've placed a stack of more than 30 photos and it ran through without issue. So far, I've scanned over 1000 photos in. Periodically, I will get a notice on my PC to clean the scanner and have noted a few photos come through with lines on them but nothing too major.
I really like the auto-correct feature that comes with the photo scanning software. I have it set to where I can select which of the 2 scans look better and delete the one I don't want. What is really cool about the scanner, is the smallest pictures I've been able to scan so far. The card the image is on is maybe less than 2" by 1" in size, so the image is super tiny. When the photos are enlarged in the software, you can see all the details that you couldn't see (without a magnifying glass at least) on the original image. The quality and age of the photo comes into play here, so the output of what you scan really depends on what is on the original photo. I've never seen photos before of my grandparents from when they were younger than their 40's. Finding these photos has been fascinating and to be able to see them like this... :-O I've had luck scanning photos from WWII era, all the way back to the early 1900's if not before.
I've used the scanner to scan documents as well. The scanning process for the most part has been super easy, I've used the double-sided scan feature in the Epson ScanSmart software. I've run into a couple of errors where it scans the front of a document, shows it in the software but after you save to PDF, it is missing the front that you just scanned. Haven't quite worked out the details on that.
My 2nd run in with Epson tech support wasn't as great as the first one. The first one, I felt like I was being talked down to and like I was wasting their time. It may have been the accent, I'm not sure but the 2nd time was most definitely worse than the first.
I was scanning stacks of documents in using the ScanSmart software one night and haven't had any issues. Everything was scanning fine, I was using the double-sided scanning option in the software. Then we had a power surge and everything in the house shut off and some things came back on (like they would when something like this happens). When I booted my PC back up to start scanning again, I was now missing the double-sided scanning option and could not get my scanner back online to continue scanning. I had the option of single-sided scanning and the option for the trial to scan receipts and invoices but my double-sided scanning option was no longer there. I performed several actions to troubleshoot the problem, including uninstalling/reinstalling the ScanSmart software, unplugging and plugging back in the scanner (finally got that back online and it would scan photos but NOT documents to PDF), uninstalled drivers for OCR and PDF, a myriad of other things in the correct steps needed to be taken. I finally gave up and called Epson. The first guy I talked to had no clue what I was talking about when I mentioned the double-sided scanning option in the software, played it off like I had no idea what *I* was talking about and was just in general incompetent. I finally got transferred to a manager who also talked down to me and because apparently it was right before their end of shift/end of day, told me that he would email me a document on how to remove a "core folder" for the software within 5 minutes after we got off the phone call, only to be hung up on and lied to. I ended up using the contact support feature on the epson website and told them everything and it wasn't until after I submitted that, that I got the instructions I was promised before that I didn't get. Long story short, I ended up figuring out how to fix the scanner issue that required a lot of digging through program files on my PC, temp files and other places. Any average person would probably not have been able to figure this out on their own.
My experiences with Epson have been LESS than stellar. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being excellent, 1 being the worst, I'd rate them at a 2 or 3.
The scanner itself works great. There are flaws, you will/may run into issues. Being able to scan in all these photos has been a relief to finally be able to do. Be prepared if you have to call Epson though as you will probably get the same level of service I received.
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