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

We inherited photos from my parents, a grandmother, and a grand uncle. We want to scan these photos along with all our pre-digital photo prints. We have thousands of photo prints to scan.Printer setup was very easy. It was ready to go within 30 minutes of unboxing. I scanned a few batches of 4x6 and 5x7 photos. These scanned very quickly at about one photo/second. I decided I wanted higher resolution scans and switched from 300 to 600 dpi. Scans took about 3 seconds each. This is still many times faster than I could scan on a flat bed scanner.Scan results are very good. I turned on all of the enhancement and restoration settings. In some cases, the results were excellent. In others, the scanner and software made unacceptable changes. I set the option to save an original copy plus the enhanced copy. This gave opportunity to chooses which to keep.The software suggests cleaning the scanner and provides instructions and a video to help with the process. The manual suggests cleaning after scanning 500 photos. I plan to clean rollers and scanner glass after each use. This will help prevent lines and streaks in scanned images. It should also prevent sticky build-up on rollers that might cause jams. The scanner user guide also recommends wiping off photos before scanning which is a good idea regardless of the scanner used.So far, I love this scanner and highly recommend it or the newer FF-680.

I bought this machine to scan several thousands of print photos. It was quick, easy to use, and the photos have turned out great so far. I liked the scan- the -back feature a lot. I used a microfiber cloth to wipe out the insides and the rollers frequently and kept it covered when not scanning. Had very few jams - mostly operator error. I also wiped off any especially dirty or dusty photos before scanning. I really liked saving the $$ over a new machine, and being backed by the warranty was definetly a deciding factor in buying refurbished.The only negatives I can say is that it would be nice to have a re-sizing feature when using the fragile photo feeder cover. Scanned the whole page of the transparent cover, even if the photo(s) took up 1/4 page. The" scan the next batch" function, combined with " prompt me to describe", was a little clumsy in the software but manageable.Once I got the hang of the naming, I found the organizational tools quite sufficient to get things in proper places.

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.

I had high hopes for this machine and indeed it has a lot to offer. My first impression in playing with it was good....easy to install and set up, scans are decent and the enhancement function works well enough. The scans compared well with those from my higher resolution flat bed scanner. So I was quite hopeful that it would help me digitize my 20 albums of photos. Unfortunately, after doing only about 25 photos, it started to distort maybe 25% of those coming out. As some reviews note, this can be a problem when doing high volumes over many hours, but I only got a small number through it. True, the machine was powered on for a couple of hours and the fan did come on for a little while, but come on now, it has to work properly for longer than this. Not sure if this problem is because mine is a refurbished unit, or if I would have better luck with the newer model, but this one is going back. Very disappointed.

I was hoping for something that worked a bit better, but you get what you pay for.HARDWARE: When scanning stacks of photos, it is quite prone to pull 2-3 photos at a time, making scanning large groups a pain. I had to split the stacks into 4-6 photos per stack, and even then I'd have to re-scan the entire stack due to multiple photos being pulled at the same time.SOFTWARE: With no rhyme or reason, the software randomly orientates the photos however it sees fit - some images upright correctly, some sideways, some upside down.This is far from an easy process, but its manageable with time and patience.