Review: Automatic Photo Scanner

Epson Perfection 2480Well, its been YEARS since I’ve taken good old analog pictures, and i’ve had it on my wishlist to scan in all my old photos. There are various services out there that will scan in your photos for you, but i always like to see what’s possible to do yourself. I didn’t do a ton of research, but some basic checks seemed to be around $150 for a service to scan a box of photos the size i have (around a large shoebox).  So I’ve been looking around to see if i can do it cheaper myself.  Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a huge market for consumer priced photo scanners with auto feeders (too bad!). If you’re looking for a new all-in-one printer/scanner, you can find many from $100-200 that have automatic document feeders, but most these feeders are made for 8×11 paper, not photos. Given the price of toner/ink these days, i was at a decision point on my old printer. A few deals popped up, and i researched a few options, but couldn’t find anything that definitively said it could handle photos in the feeder.

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New Toy: Energizer XP8000 battery (Review)

Energizer XP8000This week brought the arrival of my brand new XP8000 battery ($55 @ woot). When i saw this for about half-price on Woot, this sounded like a great addition to my travel gear, with USB output or adapters to provide extra power all my gear, and especially my netbook-n-tosh  Dell Mini 10v ($200 refurb @ Dell Outlet). It even claims to power an iPad. We’ll see about that when the iPad arrives in October, but I’m not too worried.

Anyways, my main use was some extra power for the netbook (on planes or long car rides for example), with secondary use as emergency power for my other devices.  Larger (6 cell) batteries for the Dell are anywhere from $44 on ebay to $135 from Dell, and of course they would only power the netbook (or anything you can plug into the netbook, which is most items).  Considering that’s a huge percentage of the cost of the netbook itself, I had cheaped out and just went with the original 3 cell netbook battery which lasts about 2 hours.  So how did this test out?

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