I Bought A Scanner! No, Not A Negative Or Slide Scanner But A Print Scanner And I’m Having A Great Time With It!

Epson FF-680W High Speed Scanner (Epson Marketing Image)

I bought a scanner during the recent Christmas holiday sales.   It is not a film scanner and not primarily a document scanner although documents can be scanned.  What I bought was a scanner that is designed specifically to scan photographic prints. I’m sure you are asking yourself why I would want to scan prints?  Read on and I’ll explain.

What I purchased is an Epson FF-680W High Speed Scanner.  You may have seen the advertisements with Shaquille O’Neal and his mother scanning family snapshots.  Those advertisement ran quite frequently over the holiday season.  It is officially called the “Epson FastFoto FF-680W Wireless High-Speed Photo and Document Scanning System.”   You can see it here on Amazon’s website (no affiliate links).

The scanner allows scanning at 300 dpi, 600 dpi and 1200 dpi resulting in creating either a TIFF file or JPEG file.  There are options for the scanner to automatically add some luminance, color, saturation and defect corrections to the scanned print, if you desire.  If you enable those functions, you then have a choice of adding corrections to the original scan or it will save the original, as is, and add the corrections to a duplicate scan.  I will say the scxanner is fast, very fast.  It can scan a 4”x6” print in less than a second.  It also allows batch scans, file naming, creating and placing the scan in a folder of your choice, etc.  All in all, the scanner’s abilities are pretty well thought out.  I’ve now scanned prints from about 1”x1.5” to 8”x12” with no issues.  Polaroids as well.  They provide settings for instant prints and panoramic prints if you need them.

Setup is easy and straightforward and I connected the scanner to my home network so I can scan wirelessly.  That doesn’t seem to slow things down from a wired connection.  So far, I’m impressed with this thing.

(Epson Marketing Image)

So, why did I buy this scanner?  I’ve been photographing for over 50 years.  From 1971 through 2001-2002, my photo archive is on film and in prints.  Thousands of negatives, slides, small and medium sized prints as well as 8”x10” enlargements (I used to print prolifically, both analog and digitally) are stored in plastic bins at my home.  Not only does this archive represent my life's photographic work, but also contains one-of-a-kind prints from my distant past and beyond (19th century family photos) that have a great deal of sentimental value as well as historical value in regards to my family.  There are hundreds of snapshots (no negatives) from the 1950s-80s in boxes—photos that were made by my parents and me while growing up.  The rest are in the form of hundreds of envelopes with prints and negatives that I had developed in photo shops and/or drug stores over decades.  The mainly 8"x10" enlargements I made are in archival folders.  This body of work represents decades of photos of my children, extended family, family events, family holidays/vacations, travel and my serious photography.  The enlargements are of some of my favorite ‘serious’ work.  But there is a problem having all of these slides, negatives and prints stored in an archive.

The problem is who knows what is in all of those envelopes?  Who knows where the individual negatives and slides are that go with the enlargements?  Who is actually going to look to find something?  No one.  Much of it I don't remember as well.  Too many photos of too many things over too many years.  In other words, most likely, almost none of the records of my family and my life will ever been seen by anyone, ever.  I would predict, after both my wife and I are gone, my children will simply take all of those photographs, negatives and slides to the dump.  Sad, but that is the way things work.

Several months ago I had a thought.  What if I scanned the prints and made digital copies?  At least the photos, snapshots, etc., could be keyworded, cataloged, searched, found, seen and saved.  Saving a hard drive with this archive is certainly easier than saving thousands of negatives, slides and prints.  That's why I bought the scanner.

An example of an 8"x10" print scanned as a 600dpi TIFF file and then 
edited in Lightroom with some added sharpening in Topaz Photo AI.
(click to enlarge)

As opposed to my analog photographic archive, all of my digital files are neatly cataloged and keyworded in Lightroom Classic.  Easy access.  Easy to find what you may be looking for.  Easy to share, etc.  The old film archived images will most likely never be seen.  Unable to shared with other family members.  In fact, no one in my family even remembers most of these artifacts of our family’s history.  A digitaized archive is easily accessible.

Before you ask. yes, scanning negatives and slides would give me a much higher quality of image.  Absolutely.  But absolute quality is not the goal.  It is really not needed.  The goal is to make these photographs accessible for now and in the future.   My idea is to scan the prints at a decent resolution, let the scanner apply some initial corrections, then add them to my Lightroom catalog.   I’ll then discard most the prints and negatives but I intend to keep the very important ones.  Having those vintage snapshots in one’s hand are much more valuable than a digital replica on a computer screen.  For example, I have prints of my ancestors from the mid-19th century—formal portraits.  Invaluable.  Those and others of like importance will be kept.

After scanning the prints, since I'll have two copies—the original scan as well as a second, corrected copy—I will go through them and judge which scan is better (sometimes the corrected copy blows out highlights of blocks up shadows), hit the 'X' key, which then will mark them for deletion.  When the entire archive has been evaluated, I will bring up the X-marked flag in Lightroom and delete all the marked images in one batch.  That will be infinitely better than trying to delete each unwanted file individually.  That then leaves me with the best scan of each print.

With my wife recovering from her two serious medical emergencies from last fall which greatly restricts our movements (i.e., I’m pretty much stuck at home for the time being—willingly and not complaining in any way), I thought now would be a good time to scan these prints.  You can read about all that in a post I previously published here.

A few weeks ago, I brought out the first large plastic bin full of random prints as well as about 50 envelopes containing negatives and 4"x6" prints.  Opening a smaller box inside, I was amazed at what I found.  I found snapshots (no negatives) from the early 1950s and 1960s that I’ve never (or don’t remember) seen before.  Prints of me when I was about an hour old!  Snapshots of my parents and some of their friends when I was an infant, toddler and child.  Those photos of relatives from the 19th century I mentioned.  Photos of a few of my childhood birthday parties and family vacations.  Photographs of Christmas at our home.  I’d say the memories came flooding back.  I had completely forgotten about (or never even knew about) most of those events but now, by scanning them, I have created more memories of my childhood as well as my family.  What a wonderful experience to be unfolding in front of me.  I have become more enthusiastic about finding, remembering and reliving long forgotten events in my life!

This was a scan from an 8"X10" print.  The original was a 
Velvia 35mm slide shot around 1995.  (click to enlarge)

So, my winter project is scanning all the prints and enlargements I can find that are loose as well as those in the drug store (or photo shop) envelopes with the negatives.  For the past few weeks I’ve been working diligently on accomplishing this but I have a long way to go!  

One aspect of this project is, that until I got into it, I didn’t realize I had as many envelopes as I do!  So far, I’ve scanned in over 2200 prints and I’m probably about a third of the way done.  Although tedious, the pleasant aspect of this project is that the photos from birthday parties, family vacations, holiday gatherings, travel, etc., would never have seen by me either.  

One of the other benefits I am finding from this project is that I can scan the 8”X10” enlargements as 600 dpi TIFFs.  That allows me to fully edit them, sharpen them and potentially post or share them in the future.  Photos I know I won’t use for that purpose, I scan at 300 dpi as JPEGs.  Again, scanning negatives and slides produces much better quality, but either I would have to pay a service a lot of money to scan them or scanning them myself would probably take me months if not years.  Realistically, I have no desire to scan the negatives and slides as, other than looking at them, they will never be printed, enlarged or displayed.  It makes sense just to scan the prints.

I had forgotten all about this photograph.  I shot it on September 20, 1977 with a Nikon F2A and a
Nikkor 35mm f/2 lens at 1/30th. sec. @f/2 on Kodachrome 64.  I actually won a Kodak Law
Enforcement photography contest with this image.  This print, which Kodak returned to me, is the
only artifact I have of the event. Scanned from an 8"x10" print.  (click to enlarge)

As far as the results are concerned, they are okay.  Better than I need in most cases.  In some of the scans I have noticed some small artifacts such as dust (I don’t plan on blowing off these prints before scanning).  On a few of the 8”X10” prints that I have scanned, when sharpening them a bit in Topaz Photo AI, I have noticed the random artifact from their sharpening algorithms.  So far, by carefully choosing and manipulating the sharpening method, I have been able to largely negate them.  But let me go back to why I’m scanning—not to print from these but merely to digitize them so they can be found and viewed.  So perfection or extreme high quality is not necessary.

So far, I have also discovered that many of the photos I had taken during my photographic travels over the past 50 years I had forgotten all about.  Until I saw them once again, I had forgotten about all of those local and regional photographic excursions I had made over the decades either solo or with my photographer friends.  That, alone, gives me reason to digitize them—for my own memories and satisfaction of being able to review 55 years of my work. 

Considering everything, I’m finding this project very worthwhile—at least from my point of view.  One last thought.  If I had to scan negatives and slides individually, none of this would ever be done.  The prints, negatives and enlargements would simply be thrown away because, as I previously mentioned, no one is going to take the time to sit down, open up hundreds of envelopes, boxes of prints and go through them one-by-one to see what they are.  No, all that family history would be lost without a second thought.

DISCLAIMER:  I have no affiliation with any company.  I don’t have advertisements, affiliate links, nor click-through sites.  I don’t get any commissions, discounts nor in-kind compensation for my opinion about various products.  I pay what you pay most likely from the same retail establishments that you use.  My goal is to share my knowledge, opinions and experiences to be helpful to others so hopefully they can enjoy  photography as much as I have enjoyed it over the past 54 years.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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