A Techy Sort of Day - The Need to Preserve Your Memories

I spent the majority of yesterday and today comparing different types of scanners to scan documents and photographs with the fastest speed and with the best quality.  

I have been doing this for some time but it wasn't until I was Facebooking with Amber Orosco Kennedy yesterday that I decided I needed to get my rear in gear and just buy something and move on.  Amber and our Becky grew up together when we lived in Santa Rosa, California from May 1997 to September 2000 and I worked with Amber's mom, Ginger at church in Young Women.  Amber's parents nearly lost their home in the Santa Rose fire a few weeks ago - the fire stopped just six houses from theirs - but a few other friends and neighbors we knew lost their homes (Alan & Veronica Darrimon and Jack & Janet Reisner) and all their possessions.  After this devastating near loss for Lou and Ginger Orosco, Amber started scanning all of her dad's journals and posted her progress on Facebook.  Could you imagine if you LOST all those journals of your life?  How tragic would that be?

Amber scanning her dad's many journals of his life.

I actually brought 2 boxes of documents to scan with me on this first leg of our full-time journey, but was dreading using the old flatbed scanner which would take like FOREVER to scan everything.  Don't get me wrong, I have one of the best scanner out there for photos (Epson Vision Perfection V600 Scanner), but was dreading opening up the flatbed lid over and over and over again for documents, journals, notes, etc. I even bought a CanoScan LiDe 220 that is my travel scanner, but it's the same problem...the lid.  

2 Boxes here and about 20 more at home plus Journals, Notebooks, etc.

I always back up all my files on my external hard-drive that has a link to my Dropbox, so even if I lose my backup files, everything is still in the cloud until I can restore everything again to an external hard drive.  I have a Toshiba 2TB Canvio Connect External Hard Drive.  So far, I have only used 123 GB and have 1.69 TB of storage still available and I already have thousands of photos and documents (a genealogist has a lot of this) and I have WAY more still to do.  Scott says even with the 2 TB, I should never run out of storage space...not sure that's true, but we'll find out, won't we?  So, it's important to back up anything you scan externally so even if your computer crashes, your documents and photos are safe.

Toshiba 2TB Canvio Connect External Hard Drive

My plan is to scan all my documents and only save the actual journal, certificates and things of most importance and toss the rest of the paper.  After all, paper can just suck you up!  The paperless system is the way to go to keep your life organized!  The other important thing is that I needed something with .pdf capability, word capability, search capability, and editing capability.  I hadn't found want I wanted until today...

At any rate, back to todays research.  After searching for 48 hours and comparing schematics and such, I'm ecstatic to share my results:

Documentation Scanners

The choice for me was between the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Color Sheetfed Scanner and the Epson® WorkForce Wireless Color Duplex Document Scanner, ES-500W.  Rather than explain all the details and bore you to tears, here is the video's for both models and if you click all the links you can see for yourself all the differences.

Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 (Rated 4.7 overall)

Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500

Epson WorkForce Wireless ES-500W (Rated 4.5 overall)

Epson WorkForce Wireless ES-500W

Both scanner were nearly identical in capabilities, but...my choice was the Fujitsu Scan Snap iX500.  My reasoning was that it held larger sheets of paper, scanned at a larger 64/32 color/gray dpi and I liked the software package better.

Both of them had blank page removal, cleaned up back page bleeding, had searchable PDFs, auto-crop and orientation, separation rollers, etc.  Fujitsu had only 25 color ppm while the Epson had 35 ppm but the colorability and the page widths did for me in selecting the Fujitsu.

Photo Scanner

I already own the best photo scanner on the planet, the Epson Vision Perfection V600 Scanner with 6400 x 9600 dpi, however, it is a flatbed scanner and I was having a really hard time with how slow it was - although it had Digital ICE technology.  I wanted something else that would do a much faster, but quality job on the 3x5 photographs - not just the old photos and portraits that the Vision Perfection scanner does.  So, I selected the Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-speed Photo Scanning System.  It's the world's fastest photo scanner (1 photo per second!) with a nice 600 dpi for color snapshot photos.  Check out the video presentation and you'll see why this is so fabulous!

Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-speed Photo Scanning System

Epson FastFoto FF-640 High-speed Photo Scanning System

At any rate, if you're thinking about the need to capture and preserve your memories, now is the time to do it and I'd suggest these tools to help you on your way.