Epson’s latest FastFoto FF-640 has been launched by the company with the introductory price of $649.99. At a first glance, this may 
look like a typical desktop document scanner, but in actual it is much more than it. Of course, it scans the documents, and saves them in the different formats of text and images. But still it is much more than a scanner. Along with the superb capability to a quick scan of snapshots for digital archiving, it can churn though a large number of photo prints and save and edit. All these can be done in the manual and automatic manner. And can be archived by year, month and subject. In the words of Tony Hoffman, a leading technical analyst, It largely succeeds at this, though it’s better at scanning photos than documents, and its high price will only be worth it if you want to convert countless shoeboxes of old photo prints to digital format.
Design and features
With the size of 8.1 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches and weight of 9 pounds, it seems to resemble to any of the product line of Epson’s DS line of desktop document scanners. Enriched with an automatic document feeder that can hold up to 80 sheets of letter size paper or 30 photo prints up to 5 by 7 and also the large prints up to 8 by 10. There are less chances of bending or damaging of prints due to straight follow of prints and sheets.
Software
The scanner runs on Epson FastFoto utility, but in order to scan other types of documents, you can download Epson Document Capture Pro and Abbyy FineReader Sprint. The software helps in initiating scans, rotate, crop, enhance and restore images as well as red eye reduction. The software further facilitates the manual resolution selection at the time of setting up.
Some considerable pros of the printer
• It quickly scans, photo prints, and treats photos gently for a sheet-fed scanner.
• Epson FotoFast FF-640 is efficiently capable of scanning prints of various sizes, from passport size to panoramas.
• It can scan text from a print.
• The scanned text, images and documents can be archieved by year, month and subject.
The cons with the printer
• Epson FotoFast FF-640 is very expensive.
• The next limitation is poor text recognition in document scanning.
• There is a large scope of improvement in archiving functions of the photo-scanning software.
As the bottom line, Espon FotoFast FF-640 is a novelty in itself. Its most remarkable feature is its sheet-fed scanner that is specially designed for scanning stacks of old photo prints. But, while there are many other less expensive options are available for scanning photos (for both the individual or bulk), the market scenario is full of challenges.
