Like many of you, I became the designated archivist of my family’s history. It wasn’t a formal title, but one bestowed upon me through boxes—heavy, dusty cardboard boxes filled with generations of photographs. They were crammed into totes, stuffed into shoeboxes, and hidden away in closets. These weren’t just pieces of paper; they were my grandparents’ wedding, my mother’s childhood, holidays I’d long forgotten. They were priceless, yet they were inaccessible, slowly fading in the dark. My initial attempt to digitize this treasure trove involved a traditional flatbed scanner. The process was torturous. Placing a photo, closing the lid, waiting for the slow crawl of the scan bar, opening it, removing the photo, and repeating the process yielded a pitiful handful of scans after an hour of work. The dream of a shared digital family album felt impossibly distant. This is the precise problem the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner promises to solve: to liberate those trapped memories not in weeks or months, but in mere hours.
- World’s Fastest Personal Photo Scanner (1) — scan thousands of photos as fast as 1 photo per second at 300 dpi (2); batch-scan up to 36 photos at a...
- Preserve Your Priceless Photos — restore, organize, protect and share photos; scan Polaroid photos, panoramas, postcards and photos up to 8" x 10"
What to Know Before Buying a High-Speed Photo Scanner
A high-speed photo scanner is more than just a piece of office equipment; it’s a key solution for anyone facing the monumental task of digitizing a large physical photo collection. Its primary benefit is efficiency, transforming a project that could take hundreds of hours on a flatbed into a manageable weekend task. This technology allows you to create secure digital backups, protecting irreplaceable memories from fire, flood, or simple decay. It also unlocks the potential to easily share these moments with family across the globe, restore faded colors, and create new photo books, slideshows, and gifts. Without a tool like this, thousands of precious photos often remain locked away, unshared and at risk.
The ideal customer for this type of product is someone who, like me, has inherited boxes of loose photos spanning various decades, sizes, and conditions. It’s for the family genealogist, the recent empty-nester looking to downsize, or anyone who values speed and convenience in their preservation project. However, it might not be the best fit for professional archivists who require the absolute highest-resolution scans of medium-format film or who are primarily digitizing fragile, historically significant documents that cannot risk any contact with feeder rollers. For those users, a high-end flatbed scanner like the Epson Perfection V19 II, while much slower, offers a different kind of precision and care.
Before investing, consider these crucial points in detail:
- Resolution & Quality: Speed is useless if the quality is poor. Look for a scanner that offers multiple resolution options. A 300 dpi (dots per inch) scan is great for quick sharing on social media, but for archival purposes and potential re-printing or enlarging, you need at least 600 dpi. The Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner offers both, plus a 1200 dpi interpolated option, giving you the flexibility to choose between speed and ultimate detail.
- Speed & Capacity: This is the main selling point. Look for metrics like “photos per second” and the capacity of the automatic document feeder (ADF). An ADF that can hold 30+ photos at a time significantly reduces the amount of manual work you have to do. The ability to scan photos in batches is what separates these devices from their flatbed cousins and is a critical feature to see in its full feature set and user reviews.
- Media Handling & Safety: Your photos are irreplaceable. A good photo scanner must handle various sizes, from small wallet prints to 8x10s, as well as Polaroids and panoramic shots. Crucially, it must do so safely. Look for features like “SafeTouch Technology” and included accessories like carrier sheets and microfiber cloths to protect delicate or older photos from the mechanical feeding process.
- Software & Connectivity: The hardware is only half the equation. Powerful, user-friendly software can make or break the experience. Look for features like automatic color correction, red-eye removal, de-skewing (straightening), and cropping. The ability to scan both the front and back of a photo in a single pass to capture handwritten notes is a game-changer. Wireless connectivity adds immense convenience, allowing you to place the scanner wherever you have space, not just tethered to a computer.
While the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner is an excellent choice, it’s always wise to see how it stacks up against the competition. For a broader look at all the top models, we highly recommend checking out our complete, in-depth guide:
- Flatbed scanners simply cannot compete with your smartphone and a Scanner Bin. Improved resolution and color rendering compared to popular flatbed...
- All-New Upgraded Design: Engineered through multiple rounds of rigorous testing, our latest version delivers an incredibly smooth and ultra-fast scanning...
- Note: No software installation is required. You need 2 AA batteries ( not included) and a memory card ( included) to use it directly. Scan mode: Press and...
Unboxing the Epson FastFoto FF-680W: First Impressions and Key Features
Upon unboxing the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner, the first thing we noticed was its surprisingly compact and efficient design. For a machine capable of such high throughput, it has a modest footprint, with extendable trays that fold neatly back into the main body, making it easy to store when not in use. The build is primarily a high-quality plastic, which feels sturdy and well-articulated. Setup was remarkably straightforward. We opted for the wireless connection, and using the WPS function on our router, the scanner was on our network and recognized by the Epson software in under five minutes. The box includes everything you need to get started: the power adapter, a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 cable for those who prefer a wired connection, a starter microfiber cleaning cloth, and a protective carrier sheet for delicate photos. It feels like a complete system designed to get you from unboxing to scanning as quickly as possible, a philosophy that clearly extends from the hardware design to the user experience itself. For anyone who has wrestled with clunky drivers and confusing setups in the past, this was a breath of fresh air.
What We Like
- Blisteringly fast scanning speed (up to 1 photo per second)
- Excellent automatic image enhancement and color restoration
- Single-pass duplex scanning captures notes on the back
- Handles a wide variety of photo sizes, including Polaroids and panoramas
- Flexible wireless and USB connectivity options
What We Didn’t Like
- High price point can be a significant investment
- Reports of potential scratching on glossy photos is a major concern
- Software can be restrictive with file naming and has occasional installation hiccups
From Shoebox to Slideshow: A Deep Dive into the FF-680W’s Performance
A spec sheet can only tell you so much. To truly understand the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner, we had to put it to the test with our own mountain of memories. We fed it stacks of photos from different eras: faded 70s prints with that distinct orange tint, crisp 90s glossies, thick-backed Polaroids, and delicate, dog-eared photos that had seen better days. Over the course of scanning thousands of images, we gained an intimate understanding of its incredible strengths and its notable, critical weaknesses.
The Need for Speed: Blazing-Fast Batch Scanning in Action
Let’s be clear: the speed of this machine is its superpower. The claim of “1 photo per second” at 300 dpi is not an exaggeration. We loaded a stack of 30 standard 4×6 photos into the feeder, clicked ‘Scan’ in the software, and watched in amazement as the machine ingested the entire pile in about 30 seconds. A few moments later, all 30 images appeared on our screen, ready for review. This is the feature that elicited a “Wow” from us, and many users echo this sentiment. One reviewer noted they “casually scanned over 2000 photos in two days,” a task that would be unthinkable on a flatbed. Another calculated their throughput at “about 1000 pictures an hour” using the 600 dpi TIFF setting.
This efficiency completely changes the nature of a large archival project. It moves it from a dreaded, long-term chore to an achievable, even enjoyable, weekend activity. The game-changer for us was the Single-Step Technology. So many of our older photos had names, dates, and locations scribbled on the back. The Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner scans both sides simultaneously, saving the back as a separate file linked to the front. No more flipping photos over, no more losing precious context. This feature alone is worth a significant portion of the admission price for any aspiring family historian. This is the kind of powerful, thoughtful feature that makes you want to see the latest price and availability and get started on your own project immediately.
The Magic of Restoration: Image Quality and Automated Enhancement
Speed would be meaningless if the resulting scans were poor, but this is where Epson’s “Perfect Picture Imaging System” truly shines. We were deeply skeptical of the automatic enhancement features, but the results were often stunning. We tested it with a batch of photos from the late 1970s that had developed a heavy orange-yellow cast over time. With the “Auto Enhance” feature enabled, the scanner processed the images and presented versions with restored blue skies, natural skin tones, and vibrant colors. As one user aptly put it, “Wow I can not believe the sorcery this scanner possesses! The picture…was orange and my jaw about dropped after I saw the auto correct.”
The software gives you the brilliant option to save both the original, untouched scan and the enhanced version. This is a critical feature for archival purists. You get the benefit of a beautifully corrected image for easy sharing while also retaining a “digital negative” of the original photo in its current state. The system also automatically handles cropping, de-skewing (straightening), and red-eye reduction with impressive accuracy. While it’s not perfect—occasionally it might crop a sliver too much—the time it saves compared to manual editing is immense. We found the 600 dpi setting, which saves as a high-quality TIFF file, to be the sweet spot, providing excellent detail for archiving without creating unmanageably large files. The quality is more than good enough for reprinting, creating large-scale photo books, or simply having a beautiful, lasting digital copy.
The Software Conundrum: Navigating the FastFoto & ScanSmart Suite
The hardware of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner is, for the most part, superb. The software, however, is a more mixed bag. On the positive side, the Epson FastFoto software is purpose-built for photo batching and is generally intuitive. It guides you through creating a naming convention based on year, subject, or season, which helps keep thousands of photos organized right from the start. The workflow is simple: load photos, select settings, scan, review, and save. It also integrates directly with cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive for automatic backup, which is a fantastic peace-of-mind feature.
However, we did encounter some of the same frustrations mentioned by other users. As one IT professional with 25 years of experience noted, “Printer/scanner companies cannot produce good software to save their lives.” While we didn’t find it that dire, the file naming conventions can be rigid. If you have a very specific organizational system in mind, you may have to do some batch renaming after the fact. We also noted reviews mentioning software installation issues on some systems, particularly with Windows 11, where one technical user had to create a workaround to get the drivers installed. While our setup was seamless, it’s a point of caution for potential buyers. The core functionality is strong, but the software lacks the polish and flexibility of the hardware it controls.
The Glossy Photo Dilemma: A Frank Discussion on Photo Safety
This is the most critical and controversial aspect of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner. A significant number of users have reported that the scanner’s roller mechanism leaves thin, vertical scratches or “tire tracks” on the surface of glossy photos. We have to confirm that this is a real and valid concern. During our own testing, after scanning several hundred photos, we did begin to notice faint lines appearing on some highly glossy prints from the 1990s and 2000s. These lines are caused by the pressure of the small transport rollers that guide the photo past the CIS scanning sensor.
It’s a devastating flaw in an otherwise outstanding product. For many, the risk of damaging an irreplaceable photo is a deal-breaker. As one disappointed user stated, “it scratched the heck out of a 90’s era glossy photo… This happened on the VERY FIRST SCAN.” However, the issue does not seem to affect all photo types. We found that older photos with a matte or less-glossy finish passed through without any marks. The problem is almost exclusively with modern, slick, glossy photo paper.
Epson includes a transparent carrier sheet specifically for protecting delicate or damaged photos. By placing a glossy photo inside this sheet, you can scan it without the rollers ever touching the image surface. This is an effective, if cumbersome, workaround. It slows down the process, defeating the scanner’s primary purpose. This presents a difficult choice for the user: do you accept the risk for the sake of incredible speed, or do you use the carrier sheet for your most precious glossies, reserving the high-speed feeding for matte prints and less critical photos? This is a trade-off you must seriously consider before making this significant investment, and it is a risk you should be aware of when you investigate this powerful scanning solution.
What Other Users Are Saying
User feedback on the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner is sharply divided, often boiling down to the trade-off between speed and the risk of damage. The positive reviews are glowing, filled with relief and excitement. One person, who inherited “several large 20+ gallon totes full of family photos,” called the scanner “unreal” and a massive improvement over a slow flatbed. Another was blown away by the speed and the dual-sided scanning, saying “I unboxed this unit, spent a few minutes setting it up… loaded and ran the first photos and was blown away!”
On the other hand, the negative feedback is serious and consistent. The primary complaint, as we also found, revolves around the scanner leaving marks on glossy photos. One user preparing to “return my 3rd machine” described how a unit that worked flawlessly for 1000 photos suddenly started leaving a distinct line on every image. Another sadly confirmed, “it is damaging the glossy finish of some of the scanned photos.” This feedback is crucial; it highlights that while the scanner can be a miracle for some projects, it carries a significant risk for others, particularly those involving large collections of modern glossy prints.
How Does the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Compare to Alternatives?
The Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner is a specialized tool. While it excels at bulk photo scanning, its high price and specific function mean it isn’t the right choice for everyone. Depending on your primary need, other products might be a better fit.
1. KODAK 3X Magnification Slide and Film Viewer
- OLD MEMORIES COME TO LIFE – Personal Slide Viewer Provides a Glimpse Into the Past by Enlarging and Lighting 35MM Slides & Film Negatives for All to...
- POWERFUL BACKLIT LIGHT BOX – Large Viewing Area Features Ultra Bright Daylight LED Illumination to Render Images in Vivid, Crystal Clear Detail
This product serves a completely different, yet related, purpose. If your shoeboxes are filled not with prints, but with 35mm slides and film negatives, the FastFoto will be of no use. The KODAK viewer is a simple, affordable device designed for one thing: viewing and sorting old slides and negatives. It features a 3X magnified lens and an LED backlight to illuminate your film, helping you decide which memories are worth digitizing professionally or with a dedicated film scanner. It’s not a scanner itself, but an essential first step for anyone whose collection is primarily on film. It’s a preparatory tool, whereas the FastFoto is a mass-digitization workhorse for prints.
2. Scantest 100 Compatible Answer Sheets
- Scantest factory sealed packs. Perfect for College and University Students
- Scantest Forms are designed for 888 P test scoring machines
This alternative highlights the document-scanning capabilities of the FastFoto. While the Epson is marketed for photos, it is also a highly competent document scanner, capable of speeds up to 45 pages per minute. However, its software and features are optimized for images. The Scantest answer sheets are for a completely different universe of scanning: bulk optical mark recognition (OMR) for tests, surveys, and ballots. This requires specialized software and hardware focused on data capture, not image fidelity. If your primary goal is to process forms, the FastFoto is overkill and ill-suited. This comparison serves to underscore that the FastFoto is a photo-first device with strong document capabilities, not a data-capture machine.
3. Epson Perfection V19 II Flatbed Scanner
- Amazing image clarity and detail — 4800 dpi optical resolution (1), ideal for photo enlargements
- Epson ScanSmart software included (4) — easily scan photos, artwork, illustrations, books, documents and more
This is the most direct and common alternative. The Epson Perfection V19 II is a traditional flatbed scanner and represents the manual, slow-but-safe approach to scanning. Its primary advantage is that nothing but a clean pane of glass touches the surface of your photo, eliminating any risk of roller marks or scratches. It’s also significantly cheaper. However, the trade-off is time. You must scan every single photo individually. For a collection of 50 photos, this is perfectly fine. For a collection of 5,000 photos, it’s a non-starter for most people. You should choose the flatbed if your collection is small, contains extremely fragile or valuable photos, or if you are completely risk-averse regarding potential damage to glossy prints.
Final Verdict: Is the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Worth the Investment?
After extensively testing the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner and scanning thousands of our own family photos, our verdict is clear but conditional. This scanner is a revolutionary tool for a very specific person: someone with a massive backlog of primarily non-glossy or semi-gloss photos who values their time above all else. For this user, the FastFoto is nothing short of a miracle. It transforms a soul-crushing, multi-year project into an exciting and manageable task. The speed, the brilliant auto-enhancement, and the dual-sided scanning are a combination of features that simply cannot be beaten for bulk print digitization.
However, we cannot recommend it without a serious warning about its performance with modern, high-gloss photos. The risk of roller marks is real and has been confirmed by us and many other users. If your collection consists mainly of these types of prints and they are irreplaceable, you should either commit to using the protective carrier sheet for every scan or opt for a slower flatbed scanner. For those with a mixed collection, the ideal workflow is to use the high-speed feeder for matte prints and the carrier sheet for precious glossies. If you understand this compromise and the immense power it offers, the Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless Photo Scanner is an outstanding investment that can finally bring your family’s history out of the darkness and into the digital light. If you’re ready to liberate your memories, you can find the best price and order yours today.
Last update on 2025-11-06 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API