This is Part 4 of my review of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-speed Photo Scanning System - other parts are here: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3.
So a quick confession here - when the review scanner first arrived, after getting it set up, the first thing I scanned was not photos, but some documents. I was getting ready to send some VHS tapes (home movies from her childhood) to my daughter, but I wanted to copy the notes about each video before sending the originals to her.
These notes were all double-sided, so I decided to use the FastFoto scanner to quickly scan both sides, since I needed to mail the tapes later that same day. The Epson FastFoto software was installed, so I used that. It only lets you save the scans as JPEGs or TIFFs, so I saved them as JPEGs. I didn't write down all the settings I used, but I got some images so I can refer to the information on them later if needed, and sent most of the originals on to my daughter, back in the cases with the tapes they described. There were three sets of notes that matched tapes that had already been digitized, so I sent her JPEG scans of those notes and kept the originals.
As I've been using the scanner and reading the user guide more thoroughly, I learned that the Epson ScanSmart software was more appropriate for most documents - especially ones like these, black on white. It also had the capability to save the scans as PDFs - and as searchable PDFs. So I decided to re-scan the originals I still had.
These original documents were created in 1993 to 1995 on a dot matrix printer. Here are the steps I went through to scan them.
When you start the Epson ScanSmart software, you get a screen like this:
I first clicked on the Settings button in the upper right corner, which opened the following menu:
I clicked on the button that said Scan Settings, to see what those were. That opened up this separate window. These were the default settings, so for the time being, I left them as they were (note the scan resolution is 200 dpi). I clicked the save button, which returned me to the previous screen.
I next selected File Name Settings from the menu on the left. I left this with the defaults as well, which included checking the box for automatic naming using optical character recognition (OCR) - I was curious to see how that worked.
Next I went to Save Settings in the menu on the left. Since I wanted to test saving these documents as PDFs, I clicked on the Options button for that choice, which opened up a new window.
Here's the window for PDF settings. I left these as they were. I had to look up a PDF/A file. It's a standard format used for archiving (hence the A) electronic documents - more info here. In this case, I don't need that, nor did I need any of the Security settings, such as setting a password to open the file. I clicked OK, which took me back to the previous screen, pictured above. I was done with settings, so I clicked the Close button.
That took me to the screen that comes up when you start the software (the first image in this post). I was ready to click on the big blue button on the left, to scan double-sided. But first, I needed to load the documents into the automatic document feeder (ADF) of the Epson FastFoto scanner.
For documents, you load them top side first, but with the fronts of pages facing the back of the scanner, instead of the front - the opposite of photos (which face forward).
After loading the documents and pressing the big blue "SCAN double-sided" button, it took about 10 seconds (at 200 dpi) for the software to scan both side of four pieces of paper. I got a screen that allowed me to review, edit (delete, rotate, or crop) and/or re-order the scans. Everything looked good, so I clicked the Next button at the bottom right of this screen.
This leads to a screen where you have lots of options on what to do with your scanned image - save (to computer), attach to email, send to Google Drive or Dropbox or Evernote or Gmail or Microsoft OneDrive, print, save to Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint, and (on a trial basis) manage invoices and receipts. I chose Save.
The software will plug in the default name from the File Name Settings I discussed earlier in this post. I guess OCR couldn't generate a name, perhaps because these were 30+-year-old dot matrix documents scanned at 200 dpi. No matter. I wanted to change the file name to something more relevant for me anyway, as well as change the folder where it would be saved. You could also select the file type ...
... which gave you a number of options - PDF, searchable PDF, JPEG, TIFF, Multi-TIFF, PNG, and BMP.
I chose Searchable PDF, and thus also needed to select the OCR Language (the default is English). Then I clicked the blue Save button at the bottom right corner of the screen.
The OCR does work, as shown in the screen grab below when I opened the PDF with Adobe Acrobat. I decided, however, that the 200 dpi scan was too "grainy" and rescanned the documents at 300 dpi (still grainy) and 600 dpi (okay), which is what is shown below. Remember, this is dot matrix printing and the papers are more than 30 years old. I'm happy with what I got.
One more post for this series, where I'll wrap up with how easy it was to set this scanner up (with one minor glitch), the things I didn't test (and why), and what I would use - and not use - this scanner for.
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