Tote1940 Loc: Dallas

Whichever scanner you get be sure to try Vuescan Hamrick.com
Using it for close to 20 years multiple scanners flat bed and film over 300k scans
No scanner software not even Silverfast easier and more complete
Bought it once, free upgrades, initially Win now iMac . Never problems
Does not need TWAIN driver so it works with pretty much any USB or firewire scanner
A few days ago dusted off my Microtek i900 which has a film drawer under glass for direct off emulsion scanning and Vuescan ran on Mac perfectly. i900 must be at least 15 years old
One more note, scan in TIFF , I made error of scanning in JPG many times and now looking back wish had TIFF version

Old Coot

Epson FF680W works perfectly on the Mac, Mojave version

drrobins Loc: San Francisco East Bay (Walnut Creek)

I bought the older Epson FF640 about 5 years ago, when it first came out, strictly to scan the thousands of old snapshots of drugstore printed quality. Sitting there gathering dust in boxes and cabinets and our kids wanted access to them. I had already scanned all my old Kodachromes on a Nikon Coolscan 5000. So this was to fill in the years between the slides and when I went digital in 2004.

The quality I found is nowhere as good as my decent Epson flatbed scanner. However it is so much faster and convenient that a flatbed. You can load up to 30 prints as I recall. Resolution was 300 and 600 ppi. Color correction and red eye processing could be checked off. My scans were 1 sec per on 300 ppi and 2 sec per on 600. No way I would load all those pix on a flatbed. And I only had one jam in 7000 photos which was my fault. The photos had gotten rather curved and I forgot to bend and straighten that one batch. To an extent it can handle mixed sizes, YMMV.

The density range is not up to that of a flatbed so the shadows tended to close up. There may be some choices in the correction I didn’t use, however. The color restoration was good on faded prints and you could select strength, but if batching it applies to the whole batch. In some cases I pulled out the worst ones and scanned and corrected those separately.

A nice feature was the naming of the saved images. You could give a group name and year or date and it would name all of them with a number index at the end. Makes it easy to find an event if have taken time to sift thru and make your groups. That took much more time than the scanning.

I found the option to add scans if the backs of photos with auto detection so only ones with info got scanned didn’t work that well more me. The detection sensitivity is adjustable but missed a lot of older, somewhat faded, writing. Or you can scan the back on every picture, which for me would have been 99% wasted blanks.

For the few “great” keeper snapshots I did also scan them on my flatbed photo scanner.

In summary this is a great specialty scanner, can scan receipts and others too. I scanned every old photo I had and passed it on to a brother to do the same.

I assume the newer available FF680 does about the same.