I've had an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo flatbed scanner for nearly 20 years now - my late husband bought it sometime before we married in early 2006. So I was excited when given the opportunity to test and review the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-speed Photo Scanning System recently.
I tested this system with a Windows 10 Dell (I can't upgrade to Windows 11, so I need to go buy a new computer). Despite this, it worked fine, and the user's guide (available online) had instructions for Windows 10 as well as earlier Windows versions.
I'll be doing more than one post about this amazing system, but I'm going to jump right in with my early scanning of a small test batch of old photos of my late husband, from his early childhood between 1941 and 1944. I had seven photos, all black-and-white, all 3.5 or 4 inches by 5 inches, that my stepdaughter wanted copies of - so I needed to scan them.
When you launch the Epson FastFoto software, you get a screen that looks something like this:
In the setup process (which I'll come back to in a future post), I'd changed the setting for "Your scanned photos will be saved in this folder" from the default (for my computer) C:\Users\Owner\Pictures\FastFoto to E:\FastFoto (since my E hard drive is where I store all my data). You can always specify a different folder before scanning a batch.
Click on the Settings button (top right corner) for some other scanning settings:
For example, on the Scan Settings tab (above), you'll need to tell it what type of photos you are scanning - standard, instant (such as Polaroid), or panoramic - and what resolution you want - 300, 600, or 1200 dpi - as well as the file format you want (JPEG or TIFF).
The Epson FastFoto has the time-saving feature of being able to scan the backs of photos - if you want it to. You can set it to scan the backs only if the writing or printing there is dark, medium, or light (i.e. detectable), or to always scan both sides.
For the purposes of this test run of standard photos, I set it to scan at 300dpi and produce JPEGs, and to scan the backs if printing/handwriting was light. Sure enough, it did scan the backs of the two photos that had writing (one light, one dark).
On the Enhancements tab (above), you can set the scanner to do auto enhancements (brightness, contrast, and saturation), remove red eye, and restore faded colors. These enhancements, not surprisingly, were less effective or inapplicable to my black-and-white prints in my test run, but (as will be seen in a future post) very effective with color prints. Nevertheless, I checked all the boxes to see what would happen. I also chose to follow the recommendation to apply these enhancements to a second copy of the photo, and not to the original scan.
Finally, before scanning a batch of photos, you should look at the Advanced Settings tab (above). I checked all the boxes for this test - auto rotation (seemingly important because you are supposed to feed all the photos into the scanner in landscape orientation), curled photo correction (some of these 80-plus-year-old photos were slightly curled), and reduce lines and streaks. For the latter, the user guide notes that "enabling this setting may slightly crop your photos," but I did not have this problem, perhaps because all my photos had white borders.
At this point, I was ready to start scanning, so I clicked that button (upper left corner) on the launch screen. That brings up the "Describe Your Photos" dialog (unless you turned that off in the Organization tab under Settings), which is used to create file names, folders, and tags:
You can choose an exact year (from 1900 to 2025) or a decade (e.g. 1970s), a month or a season, and/or choose or enter a subject. You can also check (or uncheck) the box to create a subfolder for your batch with the same name.
This dialog box also reminds you of how to properly load your photos - face up and top edge first. Since my photos were all the same size, I only needed to rotate the two photos with portrait orientation to landscape. I then clicked the Start Scanning button in the lower right of the dialog box.
The software had my seven photos scanned in about ten seconds. Here are the contents of the resulting folder:
The software scanned the backs of only the two photos that had writing (or other markings, in this case stuck-on black photo album paper) on them. It auto-rotated one portrait-oriented photo, but not its back, and not the second portrait-oriented photo, both of which I'd fed in landscape style. The scans with names with "_a" at the end are the ones where enhancements were applied. In the case of these black-and-whites, it didn't always make them better, but because I'd chosen to apply the enhancements to a copy of the scan, I now have some choices on which to use (and possibly further enhance with other tools).
I was very happy with how these turned out. I decided I wanted scans at 600 dpi (for higher resolution for prints), and this time, I just fed the portrait-oriented photos in portrait orientation. They scanned just fine.
Check back later for more posts for this product review!
No comments:
Post a Comment