Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-Speed Photo Scanning System with Auto Photo Feeder (Renewed)

Getting the refurbished product saved over $150 just for starts. Except for being in a plain box rather than a fancily decorated one, I really can't tell that it isn't new. Was well packed with all the instructions and power supply & cords that would come with a new product. I've only been using it for a few hours, so I will revise this posting should any defects appear. In the few hours since turning it on, I scanned nearly 200 photos in a matter of minutes and am delighted with the results. I have over 20,000 photos to do & can now spend my time editing rather than plodding along one by one on my flat-bed scanner. Still have to print out the user guide and try some of the other features. So far I'm delighted with this equipment.A few days after receiving the scanner and running over 1000 pictures through it, I've had reinforced what my mother kept telling me. . .that cleanliness is next to Godliness. Running straight out of the box, I found streaky vertical lines on every scan. Figured out that some dust or dirt was stuck on the scanning head and was blocking the light, causing the streaks. Cleaning the heads with a paper towel dampened with a squirt of windex solved that problem. I re-ran the streaked photos, and voila, no more streaks. There is also an anti-streak setting which I checked off on the settings menu. I'm wary of using windex all the time, so found a little air blower works quite well --- do a search on "world's smallest blower". I started using that prior to each load of photos, and it works quite well without the danger of scratching or messing up the glass scanner head.Yes, I found it's possible to run most polaroids by loading them sideways so the thin picture is grabbed by the rollers and not the thicker ends.Best to put the lever on the left up to the thicker setting for this. Remember to put it back down before running regular pix, or you will begin to feed a few at a time and get jams.'Update after using for a few weeks and 8000+ photos: I'm finding that dust on the scan head the biggest headache - after dusting with each batch, I discovered that I had less problems using the scan head in the cover than the one on the body of the machine. Using the standard default FastFoto software and setting it to scan both sides, I began loading the pictures face up instead of face down, and virtually eliminated my dust streaking problem. It scans perfectly and will then scan the back only if there is writing on it. In my case, dust seems to settle only on the machine mounted scan head and not the one in the cover.Another discovery --- if you have feeding problems roll the pictures so the middle is a bit convex and makes good contact with the back of the feeder. The feeder picks up from the middle of the picture, so if it is curled toward you instead of the back of the feeder, then the rollers will not pick it up properly and will cause a misfeed. Since I've been curling pictures away from me, I've had no more misfeeds.

This scanner is super fast! It’s a great way to burn through the stacks of photos piled in the closet. I had almost bought a negative scanner, but glad I went this route as negatives fall out of photo envelopes easily and get mixed up. Photos have a tendency to stay where they belong...mostly.This scanner is easy to setup and operate. My mom has no issue operating it and has been doing a few envelopes of photos everyday. Back in the day drug stores gave you duplicate prints...after getting this scanner my mom decided to keep only one print of each photo and throw the duplicates away. Which has greatly reduced the storage space required. Using the Google and Amazon photo backup apps on the computer means that the scanned photos are now instantly shareable, too.The speed of the scanner is my favorite feature, but next in line is the photo date tool. The scanner app will ask you when the photos were taken. You can put an exact date or approximate date and it will encode the date into the photo files appropriately. This way when you upload the pics to Google or Amazon or whatever, they show up in the right order (so a photo taken in 1980 shows up in 1980 in the timeline instead of in 2020).The only two downsides aren’t really the scanner’s fault. Photos collect dust in storage, so dust can collect on the scanner glass and it will need to be wiped cleaned periodically. If you don’t, lines will show up in your photos. Dark photos seem to lose a lot of quality when scanned, but I think this has more to do with the original photo than the scanner.

I’m very happy with this. It really does scan one print per second, but there’s a processing lag after scanning (several minutes for a batch of 30), so the real throughput is much less. I can do 300 prints an hour if I’m focused, which I think is still great. It can scan at 600 dpi, but it’s much slower than at 300 dpi, the files are much bigger (4x or more), and you can’t see the difference except at very high zoom levels. 300 dpi is more than enough.The software is good, although quirky (see below), letting you specify year/decade, month/season, and event for each batch, for which it creates a directory. And it’s smart: if you scan a new batch from the same event, it doesn’t reuse the file names from the last batch, even if you’ve moved or renamed the original directory - super helpful if you’re uploading to iCloud, Google Photos, Smugmug, etc.It doesn’t jam or need cleaning as often as other reviewers led me to expect. Maybe I’m lucky or maybe my prints are clean but I’ve scanned over 5,000 prints so far and haven’t had problems with streaks and jams. I haven’t cleaned it once.I prefer the older FF-640 to the newer FF-680, especially given the great refurbished price available on the FF-640. The FF-640 was $360 refurbished when I bought it a month ago, but today it’s $440 refurbished and $560 new. The FF-680 is $500 today, but I think it was more last month - maybe it’s not selling well. The FF-640 is faster on scanning photos than the FF-680 and I have other tools for doc scans (an Epson WF-3620), at which the FF-680 is supposedly better.Downsides:(1) It wants all prints in a batch to be the same size, so it’s much less efficient if you don’t have lots of standard size prints.(2) The software is a little quirky. Sometimes it just quits. Multitasking with other apps while the software is running makes this more likely (FYI, I use it with an iMac). It’s better to re-enter the descriptive info after each batch rather that using the “scan another batch” option because if it quits during (say) batch three, you’ll also have to rescan batches one and two. You need to power it down and up if the software bombs to get it going again. Some of the bells and whistles in the software, like auto rotation and detecting writing on the back of prints, don’t always work.Nonetheless, all in all it’s fast, efficient, and mostly intuitive and reliable. It’s an excellent product for large scale print scanning that (along with the FF-680) is unique in the market. I’d have paid over $1,000 for just what I’ve scanned so far from the cheapest scanning service (ScanCafe), waited weeks, and the end result would have been much less organized. I paid a third of that for the FF-640 and when I’m done scanning my thousands of prints, I’ll sell it on eBay and get most of my money back.