Photo Scanning - MFP

I don't know anybody who scans more photos, slides and negatives than we do - particularly across Nikon, Kodak and Epson scanners. So I follow other peoples comments on photo scanning hardware with particular interest, most often via various blog posts. The photo scanning topics vary with several common themes recurring in posts. There are the "how tos" (scan, improve colour, crop, rotate, email, share and backup online) alongside several reviews and recommendations of hardware and software.

Over the last few days several posts have popped up with the theme "don't scan photos on an MFP device". Really? If you're not familiar with the abbreviation MFP stands for multi function print, those combined units that will print, fax and scan documents and prints. Given that you can buy one in my local supermarket for around £50 the quality of each functional unit isn't going to be as good as a dedicated printer or a dedicated photo or document scanner. But does that mean you should never, ever think of using an MFP unit to scan photos? Of course not, thanks to the help of one of my neighbours I checked scan quality on an Epson unit. At 300 dpi the scans of a decent print were more than acceptable. Hike the quality setting and scan images fell away, but modest results were achieved at lower resolution.

Are MFPs a photo scanning solution? If your needs are modest, and you only have a few photos to scan I think they could be. But they suffer from chronic slowness, as does any flatbed scanner. It's a one-by-one process so it will take a long time if your archive comprises hundreds of photos. Certainly you'll get a better result if you increase the quality of scanner you use but I would certainly not say you should "never" use an MFP to scan photos.