Of course, this does come with other trade-offs, namely that photos need to be fed through one at a time. The design is understated and the physical weight/footprint of the scanner is fairly minimal, meaning you can tuck it away in the corner of an office or living room. Its scan resolution is 600dpi, which clearly isn't as good as the likes of the Epson Perfection V600, but, well, that's one of the reasons it's less than a third of the price. The Plustek ePhoto Z300 is an ideal budget photo scanner, optimised for scanning printed photos in decent quality. Also, if you're scanning documents to sign, see our guide to the best e-signature software. Take a look below to see our selection of the best photo scanners available now, and if you're also planning to print hard copies of your scans, see our guide to the best home printers. We've based our evaluation on each device's specs, such as resolution, as well as customer reviews and value for money (we've included options for a range of budgets).
If your archive is a large one, you'll probably want the former, as otherwise you'll be sitting around in front of the scanner for hours.īelow, we outline our selection of the best photo scanners available now. Some scanners will be able to batch-scan, while others will require you to feed in the photos one at a time.
If so, then you'll want to look for a scanner with dedicated holders to keep the film in place.
You may be scanning more than printed photos, such as film negatives or slides. It depends on what you want to do with the scans – if you're planning on making new prints, then you need as much resolution as possible. On scanners, resolution is measured in dots-per-inch (DPI) – if you want a decent, clean scan of your photos then you should be looking for something with at least 600dpi, but many scanners go considerably higher than this. Different models offer different advantages – some are designed for speed and batch-scanning, while others are much slower, but will scan an image at much higher resolutions. However, it can be tricky to figure out which scanner you need.