I finally found the time to head down to 30 Minute Photos Etc., the Irvine photo store owned by Mitch Goldstone. I wish I had stopped by six months ago when Mitch first told me about his new super scanner.

Super, it truly is. It scans, on average, 120 photos per minute. That’s 1,000 photos scanned in approximately 8-minutes and 20 seconds.

I didn’t really believe it. Greg Magnus, the Register’s video guy who traveled with me to document this on VIDEO, didn’t believe it either. Until we saw it in action. Mitch prefers to keep the process a mystery and won’t show customers the machine. But he gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how everything works.

The service, which Mitch calls ShoeBox Reprints, starts with the Kodak i660 document scanner, a $60,000 machine meant for businesses to take photographic images of tax forms, checks and other non-digitized documents. It’s essentially a camera that takes a high-res photo of each document and files it away on a computer for safer keeping.

Mitch is pretty innovative. Jack Kasperski, who handles press for Kodak’s document imaging, told me that Mitch found a way to turn the i660 into a photo scanner fit to quickly scan consumers’ collections of old photos. The service has very few limits. It will scan nearly all sizes of photos, from 2.5-inch-by 3-inch to 11-by-14 inches. It will scan front and back (in case you want to preserve writing) and it does other sorts of documents as well, such as invitations and post cards.

Since Kodak doesn’t sell the machines directly to customers but through a third-party reseller, Jack said he’s unsure if there are any other i660s available to people like you and me. Mitch believes there’s one other store – in Rochester where Kodak is headquartered. As a result, Mitch gets a lot of orders from all over the nation. If you want to get thousands of old photos scanned in minutes, you’ve got to send your business to Irvine.

Now, to make the process go smoothly…
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