Photo/Document Scanner Recommendations

Hardware
1

Hey MPU,

Referencing this thread and the many that exist for scanners. I want to scan my photo albums, all the photos are from the 1970s-1980s (as of now) until I contact other family members.

I have been on the fence on which scanner to buy.

Does anyone have experience with the following?

  • Epson Fast Foto FF-680
  • ScanSnap iX2500 (I am confused on the difference between Premium and Photo Edition) Does the Premium not do Photo?
  • Epson Perfection V550

I have an M1 Mac Mini for reference with the latest OS.

2

The epson fast foto 680 is excellent. My wife and I have been scanning old family photos for the past few months using it and it has been just an excellent scanner. The quality of the images are sharp and it does a good job of helping you organize the photos into different folders if that’s how you want to organize them. It is also super quick scanning piles of photos. The only complaint I have about it is that it’s recently was a little moody connecting to Wi-Fi but apart from that, it’s been rock solid.

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3

I wound up using the Epson FastFoto FF-680W for an enormous project like this a couple years back, and it got the job done. I found it to be a good balance between quality and efficiency.

4

@alexcr and @sgclark , I never used a feeder for photos. Do they get damaged at all when going through a feeder?

5

I personally don’t recall experiencing any damage. Though if you have any super old, sensitive photos, you could always outsource those to a company like DiJiFi.

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6

I used Dijfi to convert a big batch of home movies from the 50s and 60s to digital, and they did an excellent job. I’d definitely consider using a reputable service for old and delicate items.

It’s expensive, but worth it for genuinely irreplaceable treasures.

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7

I use an Epson Perfection v600. Same base features as the v550 with an up-leveled version of Digital ICE dust removal. I bought it for book and fragile document scanning, and the occasional photo. Excellent machine.

Katie

8

Agree. Never had any damage to normal photos. For older photos that are fragile or damaged in any way, we would not feed those through the feeder and would scan them using an app - something like Google PhotoScan. On very rare occasion would we send to an outside service but for our purposes, using the Google App does the job for these types of pix.