Faster scanning via Thunderbolt

Question

I am a relative tech novice, and I have a question regarding Tunderbolt.
I have been looking forward to a consumer technology that will permit me to quickly scan my family's tens of thousands of photographs and negatives. Current scanners are relatively slow and not suitable for such large scale projects. I'm not sure if where the bottleneck is (USB port?). I know that there are professional services out there, but a job like this would cost way too much.
Here's my question: is Thunderbolt the technology that I've been waiting for? Will it allow my to scan photographs and negatives at a more reasonable rate? Will scanner companies incorporate Thunderbolt into their scanners? If so, when do you think that would happen?
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

In my experience, the bottleneck is not USB. Fujitsu and Panasonic sell a bunch of business class page scanners that are quite speedy, especially compared to scanning a sheet of paper on a flatbed. And despite being USB based, can do 20+ pages per minute (compared to 2 minutes per page on some slower flatbed scanners.) However the speed comes at a price. These scanners start at $500 and go in to the multiple thousands of dollars for the even higher speed scanners (and that may or may not include color!)
What many people want when scanning personal photos/slides/negatives is high quality and resolution. Scanning at a higher resolution will be slower, obviously. But what I find takes a lot of time is "tweaking" the scan. (The "quality" part.) Things like adjusting the alignment of the print on the scanner, cleaning off dust from the slide, and adjusting the color balance for the various brands and models of negatives is where most of my time is spent. While you can use Photoshop to adjust things like color after the fact, cleaning up dust and aligning the print prior to scanning pay off way more than trying to correct that later in post production. These are just some of the reasons why scanning services cost so much. (Imagine the scanned images put into iPhoto, then used as your screensaver or wallpaper, and you have to look at dusty scans everyday....and you paid to have someone do that!)
I never bothered to count the amount of negatives & slides I'm scanning, (I was afraid to know, else I wouldn't start, ) but it is a few hundred negatives and a total of several hundred if you include all the prints and negatives. I'm currently using an older Nikon slide & negative scanner, which has USB2 and Firewire. But for a $400 "pro" scanner, it's still slow despite me using Firewire. At the max resolution of 2400dpi, it takes over a minute per slide. That's one minute for the scan head to move a couple of inches, not Windows "hourglassing" because of USB. So Thunderbolt for this scanner would not help.
Eventually, there may be scanners with Thunderbolt, likely to replace the SCSI based scanners. But that would just be a connectivity option or convenience, rather than to improve performance. (i.e.: "everyone has a Thunderbolt port in 5 years, just like "everyone" has a USB2 port nowdays.) But IMHO, if you want faster scanning, your needs will have to go beyond "consumer" grade scanners.