Portable Photo & Document Scanner with 4GB SD Card - High Resolution Scanning for Photos, Business Cards & Documents | Perfect for Home Office, Archiving & Digital Backup

I have a Canon flatbed scanner that I've used in the past for photos. But it's slow. It takes about a minute per photo and you have to remove one and hand place the next. I have several hundred photos I want to scan and the thought of using the flatbed just made the task see onerous. So, I poked around online and found the Avision IS15. It's just what I had hoped for. First off, it has 300 and 600 dpi... and the 300 dpi for photos is just fine and looked as good in a side by side comparison with my Canon MG5420. Next, it's fast... about 5 to 10 seconds per photo. You just hand feed them in and the system pulls them through automatically. It comes with a a storage card, but you can use USB storage as well and/or hook it up to your computer or phone (I haven't tried those yet). Basically, you put the storage card in and turn the unit on. Then, you just feed the photos through. The widest side has to be around 5 inches or less (down to 2ish). I tried feeding photos in long side first and short side first. All scanned fine. I even did an old Polaroid instant... but it was a bit thick and needed some gentle help to evenly feed. And each file is saved sequentially. The colors seemed a bit truer than my flatbed and obviously the speed and ease were much, much better. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to clean up my photos, but my initial scans have been clean and pretty much issue free. And the scanner comes with a calibration card to feed through if the scan quality starts to deteriorate. The only thing that wasn't obvious is that there is a more detailed user manual as a PDF on the provided storage card (they provide a paper Quick Guide which is pretty thorough). I'll use my flatbed for larger photos (with a side bigger than 5 inches). But this seems like it's going to make getting old family photos digitized pretty easy. I'm thinking of getting one for my sister to make her sorting family photos easier. Oh... and it does business cards too. And I did some old postcards that my father had sent me from the 1960s. I could do the photo side... and then the text side. I was impressed. It seems from the negative reviews that there could be a quality control issue with initial units. But mine worked fine and was definitely worth the price. If I remember right, they make a larger unit (for larger photos). I might consider that if I had a lot of bigger photos, but most of mine of 5 x 7 or smaller.