I had the scanner sent directly to my parents' house so I wouldn't have to lug it over myself, but I needn't have worried: The FastFoto is relatively tiny. It's a little under 12 inches wide and weighs 8.8 pounds; I could have fit it in my backpack and still had room to spare. We planted it on the dining table right next to my mom's laptop and a massive pile of old prints. We hoped to have that table clear by dinner.

Setup wasn't hard, but it was also the most unappealing part of the process. Besides the usual tangle of cables, getting the scanner running involves downloading the software, which is ... not pretty. It looks like any other piece of printer or scanner software you've ever encountered -- that is, it's straight out of 2002. But it does the job and isn't hard to use.

Once we got it connected, we were off to the races. My mother keeps most of her photos in a small filing cabinet, so it was easy enough to take a stack of pictures and drop them into the feeder tray. The scanner can take about 30 photos; it's not an exact number, and in fact I occasionally slipped in a few extra photos to see what would happen. (When I tried for 40, the scanner refused to finish the batch.) It's also best to sort them by size, as mixing photo sizes can lead to the FastFoto missing smaller pics or stopping the batch outright.

The FF-640 is true to its claim of one photo per second. I'd start a scan and the machine would be done before my mother finished putting together the next pile. It takes longer for the computer to process the images; the software will straighten out crooked photos and, if you choose, fix common issues like red-eye and discoloration automatically.

Of course, as we discovered, this only works if you insert the pictures correctly. The FastFoto is a double-sided scanner, so I thought it didn't matter what side you put the pictures in, as it always scans both sides. The idea behind this feature is that scanning the back will archive any metadata that might be printed there, such as photo lab stamps or handwritten notes. It stores that alongside the actual photo, appending the labels "A" and "B" to the file names. Epson's promotional materials for the scanner always showed images facing upward, so that's how I dropped in my stacks of photos.

There was no discernible difference in quality between the front and back scans. But what we discovered after diving into the folders where the images were being stored is that the software will always designate the side facing downward as "A," and that's where the machine works its autocorrect magic. The end result: We now had vivid scans of dates and handwriting while all the actual pictures were as red and brown as before. A few were upside down. Luckily we hadn't scanned too many photos at that point.