This will be somewhat of a braindump of a train of though, sorry for that...
Just stumbled over this one, and by the looks of it, it seems to be quite a nice, if slighty costly way to tackle the hoard of 120 years of family photograpy history I have crated up. Probably not the highest end, running 300 DPI JPEGs, 600 DPI Tiffs and 1200 DPI Tiffs (interpolated).
The reason I find this interesting is the scanners stacking facility, and speed. The stacking facility seems to be about 36 pictures in one go, running one and one through the scanner, which is stated to take about 3 seconds for the 600DPI Tiffs, or 108 seconds for an entire 36 frames film with a basic file size of 2400X3600 off a 10*15cm/4*6" or 8,6 MPs.
Not the highest quality by far, but neither are the input which consists of mostly standard family photo-stuff, IOW Vacations, birthdays and other such everyday things worth a frame or two in the analog days, on almost all sorts of formats from 110s to medium format.
Why I find this interesting is the speed, and the Tiff format, along with some auto correction modes in the scanner software, producing both an exact copy of the picture scanned, but also a corrected one, taken reasonable care of color cast and -balance, red eye reduction and some other things along those lines. Probably the most important thing here is the time. Not entirely sure about how many pictures are in the hoard, but a guesstimate would be somewhere between 10-20K photos.
Going for the worst case scenario and 20K photos or about 556 rolls of 36 frame films, that would be 111 hours worth of scanning if I have done the math right, lets say its realistically between 60-80 hours of running the scanner, which seems to bring a decent quality, but not a high-end finished product, in a archive worthy file format.
My plan for doing the digitalizing so far has been to use a camera with a slide/negative duplicator on the end, but with some experimenting done, it do take quite a lot of time, lets say about an hour pr roll and I think that may be a bit on the optimistic side. Running with it would also leave me without any finished products, all I will have for that effort is basically the digital ground work, which needs to be processed through LR to be anywhere near useable.
Also in the equitation, is that I have several K worth of slides which needs to be sorted as well, but that is a topic for another discussion.
So basically, what I think I would get out of the Epson, is a reasonable quick way to get the picture hoard digitalized to a decent quality without much hassle and somewhat of a jumping off-point for further, but not necessary post processing. Or to summarize it, a good enough product to be put up in a LR catalogue, which can stand on its own, or be further developed if I so fancy, or need to on some pictures.
So, finally to turn back to the initial question, does anyone of you have any hands on experience with the Epson FastFoto FF-680W scanner and if you so have: is it, if not the best, so the better mouse-trap?
Just stumbled over this one, and by the looks of it, it seems to be quite a nice, if slighty costly way to tackle the hoard of 120 years of family photograpy history I have crated up. Probably not the highest end, running 300 DPI JPEGs, 600 DPI Tiffs and 1200 DPI Tiffs (interpolated).
The reason I find this interesting is the scanners stacking facility, and speed. The stacking facility seems to be about 36 pictures in one go, running one and one through the scanner, which is stated to take about 3 seconds for the 600DPI Tiffs, or 108 seconds for an entire 36 frames film with a basic file size of 2400X3600 off a 10*15cm/4*6" or 8,6 MPs.
Not the highest quality by far, but neither are the input which consists of mostly standard family photo-stuff, IOW Vacations, birthdays and other such everyday things worth a frame or two in the analog days, on almost all sorts of formats from 110s to medium format.
Why I find this interesting is the speed, and the Tiff format, along with some auto correction modes in the scanner software, producing both an exact copy of the picture scanned, but also a corrected one, taken reasonable care of color cast and -balance, red eye reduction and some other things along those lines. Probably the most important thing here is the time. Not entirely sure about how many pictures are in the hoard, but a guesstimate would be somewhere between 10-20K photos.
Going for the worst case scenario and 20K photos or about 556 rolls of 36 frame films, that would be 111 hours worth of scanning if I have done the math right, lets say its realistically between 60-80 hours of running the scanner, which seems to bring a decent quality, but not a high-end finished product, in a archive worthy file format.
My plan for doing the digitalizing so far has been to use a camera with a slide/negative duplicator on the end, but with some experimenting done, it do take quite a lot of time, lets say about an hour pr roll and I think that may be a bit on the optimistic side. Running with it would also leave me without any finished products, all I will have for that effort is basically the digital ground work, which needs to be processed through LR to be anywhere near useable.
Also in the equitation, is that I have several K worth of slides which needs to be sorted as well, but that is a topic for another discussion.
So basically, what I think I would get out of the Epson, is a reasonable quick way to get the picture hoard digitalized to a decent quality without much hassle and somewhat of a jumping off-point for further, but not necessary post processing. Or to summarize it, a good enough product to be put up in a LR catalogue, which can stand on its own, or be further developed if I so fancy, or need to on some pictures.
So, finally to turn back to the initial question, does anyone of you have any hands on experience with the Epson FastFoto FF-680W scanner and if you so have: is it, if not the best, so the better mouse-trap?
to this friendly forum, Gina.
