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The best portable document scanner
By Amadou Diallo This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy The Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here. After putting in more than 100 hours for research and hands-on testing since 2013, we think the Epson ES-300W is the best portable document scanner for digitizing documents without taking up half of a desktop. It combines scan speeds usually found on full-size scanners with extremely accurate text recognition. And thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi and battery, you can use it almost anywhere—even with a phone or tablet.
Epson's new scanner resurrected my childhood memories
My mother likes to post old scanned photos of me on Facebook. Baby me in a clown costume. Toddler me looking grumpy, having just woken up from a nap. My brother and me looking like tiny British royals on Easter Sunday. These photos are embarrassing but not necessarily for obvious reasons. I don't mind people knowing I was a child. What I do mind is that the scans aren't good: Many are crooked, badly cropped or discolored. They don't look nice, and with at least 25 years of my life captured on film, neither my mother nor I have the time to scan the entire collection, let alone fix each picture to make it presentable for public consumption. That is, until we got our hands on Epson's $650 FastFoto FF-640, which can scan one photo per second. Spoiler alert: We were done with my mom's archive in under three hours.
Epson's $650 FastFoto scanner is ludicrously speedy
Even though the vast majority of people have switched to digital photography, someone in your family likely has a box of old pictures stashed away somewhere. Birthday parties, Thanksgivings, bar mitzvahs -- there's probably some record of your childhood trapped in there. (My family certainly does.) Add in the fact that there's less and less need to own a printer, plus the tedium of scanning, and it all means those memories are likely to stay offline. Epson is looking to unearth that treasure pile of moments with the new FastFoto FF-640, which can scan, sort and even post your entire photo collection at a rate of one photo per second.
