The Photo Scanner Your Parents will Love
Organize & Digitize Your Prints & Old Photos
Product review: Plustek ePhoto z300
Every time I visit my mom we say, “We just need to pull out the photographs and go through them.” We have great intentions of sorting those boxes of old photos, labeling them all, and getting rid of the photos no one can identify or wants anymore. And yet, it never happens. And frankly, it just feels daunting. The boxes of photos aren’t huge, but how do we tackle them without losing our minds?
Well, now I have the answer. Plustek, a tech company that specializes in scanners, sent me their Plustek ePhoto z300 to try, and it is the answer to all of your photo scanning dreams. Perhaps more importantly: it is the photo scanner your parents will love!
This simple scanner has one job: scanning photographs. It will scan other items as well, certainly, but it is designed to scan photos and prints with speed and accuracy. The slanted design makes scanning hundreds or thousands of photographs seamless and simple. Photos feed through one at a time, effortlessly, and they rarely need to be cropped or manipulated afterwards.
Simple, Quick Scanning
I sat with eight full boxes of old loose photographs and in one afternoon I sorted and scanned all of them. They are now all on my hard drive, and only the truly treasured prints went back into a box. I condensed eight photo boxes down to one. Now, there were LOTS of photographs that I threw away -- photos from trips to the zoo, prints from adventures long ago, people I no longer remember. I KonMari’d as I went, and not everything deserved to be scanned, to be sure. But, in the end, the scanning process was simple and so easy, and my piles of photographs are neat and tidy with well-organized files tucked away on my computer.
And let’s be clear: these are good, quality scans which are far superior to anything you could get with a scanning app on your phone. While those apps have their place, they do not replace a good photo scanner -- particularly when archiving family photographs.
Photo Editing
The ePhoto z300 requires the installation of some proprietary software which is included with the scanner. To scan, you open the program, engage the scanner, and begin. The photos show up on the screen in batches of 60. If desired, you can edit the photos right there. Then save wherever you designate on a computer or a hard drive. Or you can save them and edit in the program of your choice.
In the included editing software, you can lighten dark images, crop, straighten, and adjust color balance -- even fixing the ravages of time in older prints. And it does not take long to learn the basics. The scanner also handles both glossy and matte prints with ease -- something many home office scanners don’t do well. The elegant photo feed eliminates glare and shadows which are common on many other flat-bed scanners. And the resulting scans are fantastic. Additionally, you have full control over the image quality when saved, so you can preserve memory as needed or save very large, high-quality files. For someone who does not have other photo editing software like Lightroom, it is great!
Personally, I use Lightroom, so after trying out the editing functions, I saved my photos in folders for editing at a later date. A Lightroom plugin would make this perfect for my purposes, but most people won’t miss that.
A few of the prints I scanned from my childhood including my first trip to Disneyland and a muddy hike through the English countryside.
Small & Convenient
Another reason to love the ePhoto z300: its size. The next time I go to visit my mom, I’ll be taking mine along with me (carefully packed, of course). It is compact , and it can be used on any computer. I know that both of my parents would find this scanner to be easy to use, and it would make a wonderful gift for grandparents and parents who may be hosting generations of photographs in their homes.
I am hopeful that my mom and I will finally spend a few fun evenings sorting those boxes of photos, and in the end each of us will have digital copies of the keepers so we can share them with our families and generations to come. I treasure these old photographs, and I am so thankful to have them in a digital format now.
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