My mother-in-law found a stash of old photo boxes in her garage earlier this year, and ended up spending an afternoon on the floor sorting through them all for us. Some of the older prints were fading like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, and a few had started to curl at the edges. They looked every bit as old as the Sunday suits in them. There were photos of people nobody could quite place anymore, and others with dates and names scribbled on the back. As I looked through them, we talked about how nice it would be to have everything scanned and saved to a Cloud service so we could share them with extended family, but like most family projects, it got filed under “we’ll get to eventually.”

Then “eventually” showed up at my doorstep in the form of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W, a sheet-fed photo scanner that can blow through a photo per second. When I saw it, I immediately thought of those boxes sitting in my mother-in-law’s garage. I’d digitized old pictures using a flatbed photo scanner before… and I recalled it being a tedious process—lay a photo on the glass, close the lid, hit scan, repeat. You can do maybe two at a time if you’re strategic about placement. The FF-680W streamlines that process and opens up the bottleneck by allowing you to stack your photos in a feeder tray and let the scanner do its thing. We managed to scan hundreds of photos in one weekend—something that would’ve taken the better part of a week on a flatbed scanner.

The FF-680W makes even the largest at-home scanning projects incredibly easy. Its feeder tray eliminates the tedium of setting up image after image, and its software can pull off a fair amount of restoration work that would normally take a fair amount of time and Photoshop skills to pull off. It’s not a small investment, but I can’t imagine an easier way to get results like this.

A Surprisingly Easy Setup Process

Next to troubleshooting WiFi problems, setting up a printer or scanner ranks as one of the most frustrating tech experiences around. Much to my surprise, I found that setting up the FF-680W was easy and painless. Make sure you download the correct Epson smartphone app, though, because there are two: FastFoto is the one you want, as opposed to “Smart Panel,” which is a more general-purpose app for its printers. I already had Smart Panel on my phone and thought I could just use that, but I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. Once I downloaded FastFoto, I was able to pair the scanner to my phone via WiFi. (If you’re setting it up with a laptop, you can also connect a USB 3.0 cable.)

The scanner itself is small enough that it doesn’t need its own dedicated table like most printers. At 11.7 by 6.7 by 6.9 inches and a little over eight pounds, it’s about the size of a large toaster. It easily fit onto the end of a cabinet in my office, where it sat for the duration of this review. In the box, you also get a carrier sheet for fragile prints, so your really fragile pictures safely make it through the scanner’s rollers.

It Scans Fast and Clean

The best thing about the FF-680W, though, is that you can digitize a lot of photos very quickly. At 300 dpi, Epson says it can scan a 4-by-6-inch photo in about one second. But does it actually scan that fast? Yes! I timed it. You can stack up to 36 pictures into its feeder tray, allowing you to power through an entire roll of film in under a minute. Going through the first shoebox of pictures—about 200 or so—took about 20 minutes, including the time spent sorting them into rough piles beforehand. On a flatbed scanner, that same stack would’ve taken me hours.

Bumping the resolution to 600 dpi slows things down to about three seconds per photo, which is still quick compared to a flatbed scanner. For most family photos, 300 dpi gives you more than enough detail and sharpness for preserving memories and sharing them on social media. That said, if you want even more resolution for any photos you might want to print later, 600 dpi is the way to go.

The automatic document feeder handled everything I threw at it, including standard 4-by-6 prints, old 3-by-5s, 5-by-7s, some 8-by-10 portraits, and even a handful of Polaroids. Old photos that have been sitting in a box for decades can stick together, so you may occasionally run into a situation where the scanner grabs two prints at once, which will render the scan unusable. I only had it happen once while batch processing dozens of photos, and when it did, the scanner alerted me to the issue, so I knew which photos I had to rescan.

And I didn’t encounter a single jam or damaged print. I was nervous about putting some of the older, more brittle prints through the sheet feeder, but the included carrier sheet helped with the ones that felt especially delicate.

The Software Does the Heavy Lifting

It also helps that the FF-680W has intuitive controls and features that make the scanning process easy. Using the FastFoto iOS app, I could set a save location, choose my scanning resolution, and control auto-enhancing, which uses the software to restore color, reduce red-eye, auto-rotate, and de-skew photos when they need it.

Seeing the original and enhanced versions next to each other made me realize just how good of a job it does of bringing old photos back to life. One print we found was almost entirely orange, and the scanner’s software made it look as if it was freshly printed. If you’re unsure if you want to enhance a photo, you can easily save both untouched and edited versions, which I think is usually the right way to go. (As a photographer, I think it’s always a good idea to keep an untouched version in case you want to edit it yourself.)

If there’s handwriting on the back of a photo, the software will detect and save it alongside the front image. Oftentimes, these scribbles provide useful context to when and where a photo was taken, so this ended up being one of the most useful parts of the whole process.

You can also organize scans by labeling each batch with a year, season, and description, making it easier to find specific images. Since I used the iOS app, my pictures were immediately saved to my phone’s camera roll, making it easy to upload them to social media or my Cloud service of choice.

It’s Also a Great Document Scanner

Beyond photos, the FF-680W doubles as a document scanner. It handles letter-size pages at up to 45 pages per minute, with optical character recognition (OCR) support through Epson’s desktop ScanSmart software, which makes scanned text searchable within your scans. I digitized a stack of old receipts, tax documents, and some car repair invoices, and it produced clean PDFs of everything. It’s the kind of feature that justifies keeping the scanner on your desk long after the photo project is done.

What It Can’t Do

The FF-680W can’t scan film negatives, so you’ll need something more advanced, such as the Epson Perfection V850 Pro, if you’ve got old film strips or slides you want to digitize. (In most cases, I’d say you’re better off going to your local photo lab.)

It also can’t scan photos that are still in albums. If your prints are glued or stuck to album pages, you’ll need to carefully remove them first. Some of my mother-in-law’s older albums had photos attached with that old adhesive film, and pulling them out was the most time-consuming part of the entire project.

At $630, the FF-680W is a high-end scanner and a major investment if you’re buying it with a specific project in mind. Given the price, these omissions sting, especially the inability to process negatives, which is essential if, like me, you still shoot photos on film. That said, the quality of the scans and the time I saved still make it an incredible scanner, especially if you have a lot of photos to process.

Who Should Buy the Epson FastFoto FF-680W?

The FF-680W is not an impulse buy. This is a scanner for the person staring down multiple shoeboxes or photo albums (and who needs some documents scanned, too). If you’ve got a couple dozen photos to digitize, a flatbed scanner like the Canon LiDE 400 will get the job done for a lot less. You could even use a free phone app if image quality is not a huge concern.

In my case, I was able to scan a whole garage full of photos and restore decades of loose, fading prints in a single weekend. It made the process easy enough that we actually did it, instead of putting it off for another year. I can’t think of a better endorsement.