Photography News Issue 63

Photography News | Issue 63 | photographynews.co.uk

First tests

Epson FastFoto FF-680W £549.99

Before

Specs

Kitchen drawers, shoeboxes and storage boxes around the kingdom are full of print wallets packed with priceless, irreplaceable memories. Should your prints suffer misfortune your precious memories are gone forever – unless you’re lucky enough to find the negatives. The Epson FastFoto FF-680W is a scanner that can digitise your invaluable family snapshots. So if disaster should strike you will have your pictures in a form that you can have safely stashed in your cloud, and making perfect copies is no problem. Image sharing is dead easy too, in a way that is impossible with physical prints. Unpack the unit and you will be pleased to know that it has a small footprint. Set-up is straightforward and it’s not long before you are ready to make your first scan. I opted for wireless set-up and the one hiccup I had was that while the scanner worked when operated from the computer, pushing the scan button on the unit itself didn’t. A reboot cured the problem. On the box it says that it takes 30 secondstoscan30prints,sothatwas one claim I wanted to test. I also wanted to try it with a mix of print sizes and also with prints taken out from an album, sowithsome stickypatches on theback. The unit scans prints and documents 8.8in wide and 36in long (216x910mm) so can handle panoramas. The scanning software has an instant print option too and offers a few auto enhancements such as red-eye removal. There are three scan resolutions on offer, 300dpi (fastest), 600dpi (recommended for archiving) and an interpolated 1200dpi. JPEG and TIF save options are also available. Using the same print, I tried all three resolutions and save options to compare times and file sizes. See the accompanying table for details. I sorted my old shoebox of prints into different sizes although I wasn’t too fussy because I wanted to see how the scanner would cope. The user guide suggests wiping the prints’ front to remove any surface dust and to make sure there is no sticky residue on the back. Prints frommy album did have small, slightly gummy squares on the back but I hoped they would be okay – they were. For most purposes, 300dpi and JPEG is fine so I started with that. I timed 32 6x4in glossy prints (front scan only) going through the scanning process in 27secs. Add some pre- scanning time and a few seconds for

Price £549.99

In the box CD manual, carrier sheet, driver and utilities (CD), external AC power adapter with power cord, main unit, quick start guide, USB cable Compatible operating systems Mac OS X 10.11.x, Mac OS X 10.12.x, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 7 x64, Windows 8 (32/64 bit) Features Skip blank page, punch holes removal, automatic de-skew, auto-rotation, advanced cropping feature for auto size, automatic folder creation, scan to cloud storage Output formats JPEG, TIFF, PDF, searchable PDF, PDF/A Duplex scan Yes Advanced document integration Scan to email, scan to network folders Image Improvement Colour correction, colour restoration Optical resolution Main 600dpi x sub 600dpi Scanning range (maximum) 910x216mm (horizontal x vertical) Colour depth Output: 24-bit colour/8-bit monochrome Ultrasonic sensor Yes Optical sensor CIS (Contact Image Sensor) Light source RGB LED Output Resolution 300, 600dpi optical and 1200dpi interpolated Scanning Speed Monochrome: 45 pages/min. Colour: 45 pages/min measured with size: A4, resolution: 300dpi Interfaces USB 3.0, wireless LAN IEEE 802.11b/g/n Energy use 18 watt (operation), 9.2 watt (ready), 1.4 watt (sleep mode), 0.1 watt (power off) Included Software Epson ScanSmart Dimensions (wxdxh) 296x169x176mm Weight 3.7kg Contact epson.co.uk

After

processing and the 32 prints took 50 seconds in total from clicking the start button to viewing finished scans. With auto enhancements switched on the same 32 prints took 56 seconds. You can scan in batches and do one big save at the end. Working like this I had 160 6x4in prints scanned and ready to enjoy in five minutes without any jamming or missed prints. One scanning feature is that any writing on the print’s back is automatically detected and the rear is scanned too. When scans are saved you get front and rear files sitting side by the side in your folder so vital information is kept with the relevant image. The sensitivity of the feature can be varied but what I did notice was that prints with pronounced branding – but no caption – were scanned, so I disabled the feature, turning it back on when needed. When auto enhancements are used you can have the corrections automatically implemented into one file or have the original and corrected files separate so you can pick the best one later. So far it had been easy going with same-size, good-condition, resin- coated glossy prints. So next was dog-

eared prints on fibre-based paper and a mix of sizes. I kept the size mixes sensible so I didn’t have big and small prints together but had prints of broadly similar sizes. I did notice that some of the smaller prints did skew slightly going through the scanner but the results looked fine. To be fair to the FF-680WI thought it did reallywell even though it jammed up three times. To clear a jam just open the printer front and take out the stuck print. One jam was due to two prints being stuck together, another occasion was a thin print, about 1in wide, that didn’t go through and finally one print had too much sticky residue and it got stuck going through. After 300 scans, the software suggests cleaning the scanner to ensure quality results. This is simple and just involves unplugging the unit, opening up the scanner and wiping the sensor and feed devices with a dry cloth or with Epson cleaning fluid. In an evening scanning session, the contents of my dusty shoebox full of family memories was ready to share (you can save them automatically to Dropbox or Google Drive) and I had over 1200 scans of various resolutions and just three print jams. WC

Above The original hand-tinted print has been improved with the scanner’s auto enhance – the feature can be turned off

Verdict

The inevitable question is what do you do with it once you have scanned all your (and your family’s) old prints because assuming you are now capturing digitally your FF-680W could soon be gathering dust. Well of course, you could sell it on or you could buy one between a group of friends or club mates, or perhaps you could offer a scanning service. Whatever the case, the Epson FF-680W is a quality unit that works very well, quickly, jammed rarely and delivers quality results. If you have a good number of prints to scan, the cost per image scan is very reasonable.

Pros Fast, works well, handles mixed sizes well Cons Limited enhancements

Times and file size

TIF

Time

JPEG

300dpi

<1sec

245KB

8.1MB

600dpi

3-4secs

8.5MB

32MB

1200dpi

5secs

24.9MB

131MB

Times and file sizes for a 6x4in colour print scan with auto enhancements switched on. Times do not include pre-scan, process and save times.

Above The FastFoto FF-680W’s software is simple to navigate, so should not hold any fears for most people