Drive bays aren’t just for disk drives. Computer accessory companies have manufactured a myriad of mundane and marvelous mechanisms to mount into your storage bays. Fan controllers, status panels, equalizers, audio interfaces, cigarette lighters, and even cassette tape players have all found homes in various PC towers. But did you know that one company had the sheer audacity to ask “could we could cram an entire photo scanner into a 5 1/4 drive bay”? Here, in Userlandia, we’re gonna see how easy it is to use the Easy Photo Drive.

You know what piece of tech has a special place in my heart? Scanners. They’re like portals for transporting ordinary paper products into a magical digital world. Nowadays anybody can become a digital archivist thanks to the proliferation of inexpensive flatbeds and multifunction devices which can print, scan, fax, and cut julienne fries. Compare that to the late 1980s and early 90s where buying a home or office scanner incurred some kind of compromise. A flatbed offered a lot of image quality in exchange for a lot of money. Hand scanners were a thriftier option, but the cost savings were often offset by the frustration of lining up each pass over your document. The ThunderScan transformed an Apple ImageWriter into a scanner with decent—if slow—results. Yet even a cheap and cheerful consumer scanner consumes considerable space and contributes to the conflagration of cables cluttering a computer desk. And that’s the context for today’s nifty thrifty: Storm Technology’s EasyPhoto Drive. It’s a full-color motorized sheet fed scanner miniaturized to fit into a 5 1/4” drive bay!

I found this new-old-stock example mixed in with the office supplies at one of my local thrift stores. The box is festooned with bold colors, sharp photos, and a point-by-point sales pitch. Wouldn’t it be fun to jazz up your presentations and documents with photos you took yourself? Or how about e-mailing your latest vacation snaps to friends and family? Storm’s EasyPhoto software and hardware promised to take the pain out of digital imaging. But you know how sales pitches go—was it truly as easy as it claimed to be? There’s only one way to find out.

Inside the box is an envelope with software and documentation, an interface card, and the EasyPhoto Drive itself. Inside the software package is a CD-ROM with drivers and the EasyPhoto software. Fill out your registration card and you could win a free color printer—hopefully it’s a good one! Don’t have a CD-ROM drive? Don’t worry, because a version of EasyPhoto on floppy disk is available for a mere eight dollars. Next is a calibration card for correctly calculating exposure. A documentation booklet walks you through hardware and software installation. This color broadsheet claims it’s the fourth volume of Storm’s PhotoEase newsletter, though I wonder if that’s actually the case. It’s like a quick reference guide for printing or copying your photos into various applications. A standard-looking warranty card offers a standard-issue one year warranty. Lastly, check out these cute custom labels for your floppy disk slide shows! Alas, there’s only two of them, but I appreciate this kind of finishing touch.

To test the the EasyPhoto Drive I’ve pulled out a perfect period PC: my Compaq Presario 5133 tower. Its 133MHz Pentium should have more than enough horsepower to scan and edit the 5x7 inch photos that the Drive can accept. Installation is theoretically easy: Install the ISA interface card, slide in the drive, and plug in the cables. But this is 2026, I’m 43 years old, and things aren’t easy anymore. During scriptwriting I hit a snag while testing the hardware. See, the EasyPhoto Drive can be opened to clean its optics by pushing on the front of the drive. The first time I popped it open a little spring-loaded plastic clip that keeps it in place broke in some way and the drive won’t lock in place anymore. Unfortunately the drive won’t power up unless it’s in the fully locked position! I MacGyvered a solution by taping the drive in place.

Another issue arose when inserting the drive into the bay. Some beancounter at Compaq decided not to include extra drive rails for this Presario’s 5 ¼ drive bays, so I had to commandeer a few from another Compaq in my collection. But attaching those rails was complicated by a lack of screw holes on the left side of the drive! It makes me wonder if the engineers even tried cases that required drive rails.

Next is the interface card. There’s not much information on this board out there, so I can’t really say what kind of protocol it uses for communication. My research uncovered another controller card for a Primax hand scanner with a similar EICI0396 chip, but no technical details. If you have any insight into this card’s design I’d love to hear it in the comments.

After installing the card and plugging in the data and power cables we’re finally ready to install some software. It’s as easy as it could be given a 1990s definition of easy. Clicking through the classic Windows installer is quick enough and after a reboot we’re ready to scan. When flipping through an old photo album to find some era appropriate material I stumbled upon the perfect test: a photo of my old Compaq ProLinea 4/33 circa 1998. I’ll give Storm credit for truth in naming because the EasyPhoto Drive is actually easy to use. Just feed a photo face-down into the slot and the drive wakes up, pulls in the picture, and launches the EasyPhoto software with no user intervention.

The motorized feeder lets the Drive chew up and spit out prints at a snappy pace. Resolution options range from 100 to 400 DPI, and you can choose between monochrome, 8-bit grayscale, or 24-bit true color modes. I found that most 200 DPI scans completed in about fifteen seconds, which isn’t terrible. A 400 DPI 5x7 print—the worst case scenario for performance—took about 35 seconds. This isn’t bad for a scanner of its era, and it’s quite fun to pop prints in and out of the drive. Image quality is about what I’d expect for a small consumer CCD scanner of the time. Details are generally sharp but the default exposure is a bit on the high side, resulting in some noisy shadows and clipped highlights. I don’t blame Storm for erring on the brighter side because family snaps of the era are likely to be underexposed, but the only way to adjust exposure is turning a knob inside the scanner and then recalibrating it. There’s no capture controls for gain, exposure, contrast curve, or color balance. And while the minimum system requirements specify 8MB of RAM, that’s going to be tight in Windows 95. A 16MB machine like this one can work on 200 DPI scans without much fuss, but 300 and 400 DPI scans exceed that amount of memory and performance craters when paging to virtual memory.

After scanning your image EasyPhoto prompts you to add it to an album. These filmstrip-styled collections let your organize your scans or import image files from PhotoCDs or other disks. Storm kept the interface simple, mimicking film slides with big thumbnails and filename labels. There’s no subfolders, metadata, or keywords, but you can set a caption. Albums can also be made into slideshows or screensavers, and images can be set as a desktop wallpaper too. By today’s standards this feature set is charmingly basic, but that’s what regular people wanted back in the day.

Double-clicking an image opens up the Photo Workshop editor. It’s a basic photo editor with tools to adjust your scans or other images. There’s options for cropping, resizing, rotating, and flipping your photos to display them in the right orientation. Basic tone adjustments like brightness, contrast, and color balance are available to tweak exposure and color. There’s even retouching tools to remove scratches or red-eye. While you can select regions with a marquee or lasso there’s no luxuries like layers or clone stamps. At least there’s a preview pane to check your changes before they’re applied. This user interface is basic even for the time, but that’s not a downside. EasyPhoto erects a good set of guard rails for the novice or casual user because digital imaging was very new at the time. Greenhorns needed a strong guiding hand to solve their common problems in a straightforward way or they’d give up, and Storm Technology thought they were the ones to do it.

Storm was formed by Dolf Starreveld, Adrian Lightenberg, and Chris Borton. Starreveld’s name might sound familiar to old-school Mac fans—he created the SCSI-Power (later SCSI Accelerator) INIT to turbocharge the Mac Plus’ SCSI interface. The trio launched Storm in 1990 and hired former 3Com CEO Bill Krause as CEO in 1991. Storm’s big break was PicturePress, an application for encoding and decoding JPEG images when such a thing was cutting edge. Storm also developed accelerator cards to speed up JPEG compression and Photoshop calculations. Remember the Radius ThunderStorm accelerator? It was based on technology licensed from Storm, hence the name. All this success caught the eye of Apple Computer, who needed photo software to support their QuickTake line of digital cameras. As it happened Storm was developing the successor to PicturePress, and they made a deal with Apple to bundle that new program with the QuickTake 150 and 200 cameras as Apple PhotoFlash.

Eventually Storm decided they wanted a piece of the consumer imaging pie and launched their first entry level scanner: the EasyPhoto Reader. Instead of designing a new scanner from scratch they took a Primax ColorMobile Office Scanner and molded the case in a distinct blue finish. Storm doesn’t really hide this fact since there’s a Primax logo on the box. Both devices use the same parallel port interface and CCD scanner engine. What set Storm’s solution apart was the superior EasyPhoto software Reviews of the Reader were solid, and Storm followed up quickly with the internal EasyPhoto Drive.

Why bother creating a scanner that could be integrated into a PC? There’s the desk space and convenience and cable clutter arguments, but here’s an answer you might not have considered: business deals! Storm signed contracts with PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Gateway to preinstall EasyPhoto Drives in their PCs. Moves like this were part of Storm’s master plan to conquer the consumer scanner market. With a wide range of well-reviewed products and millions of dollars in sales Storm seemed perfectly positioned to execute that strategy. They started 1998 on a strong note by acquiring Logitech’s scanner division. But by October they were declaring chapter 11 bankruptcy and then chapter 7 liquidation a month later.

What happened? The inexorable march of technological progress is what happened. Consumer technology like scanners got cheaper year over year in the 1990s thanks to rapid improvements in design and manufacturing. The plummeting prices of charge-coupled devices combined with cheaper interfaces like enhanced parallel ports and USB opened up the market to new, inexpensive options. All the cutthroat competition brought letter-sized flatbed scanners down to the one-to-two hundred dollar price range.

These cheap CCDs also begat the most unholy of unions: the multifunction office device. State alchemists toiling in a deep sub-basement fused a cheap scanner and printer together to create a chimera which could print, scan, copy, and fax almost anything. The scanner market was already packed at this point, and multifunctions crowded it even more. Players like Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard could afford to duke it out both in standalone and multifunction devices because they designed and built both the printer and scanner engines. Their manufacturing advantages and economy of scale meant they could keep costs under control while catering to all ends of the market. The midsized scanner companies like UMAX, Plustek, Microtek, and Mustek had footholds in specialist markets which insulated them somewhat from the fickle consumer market.

Storm and other bit players were casualties of a race to the bottom. They unceremoniously declared chapter 7 bankruptcy on November 25, 1998, and their assets were scattered to the wind. With no official support resources, customers were left in the lurch. So they did what all fans of unceremoniously cancelled products do: create their own support network! Trevor Monahan was one such customer, and he compiled an unofficial website to host scanner drivers, documentation, and other support resources for Storm products. His work was invaluable for this production. Trevor, if you’re out there, thank you.

So where do we place the EasyPhoto Drive in the annals of odd and obsolete tech? As a scanner nut I can’t help but appreciate the gumption to place a scanner where you wouldn’t ordinarily find one. You’re not using all of those 5 ¼ bays, right? So why not jam a scanner in one of them and email grandma cute snapshots of the kids? It’s something that could only be devised by a true believer in the mission of scanning, and among Storm’s products it’s certainly their most distinctive.

Here’s a thought experiment: let’s say I was a writer for a prestigious PC publication in 1996. I’m charged with reviewing the EasyPhoto Drive for my upcoming monthly column. Would I recommend it to my readers? The image quality is reasonable and its price tag won’t scare your wallet. EasyPhoto is super easy to use, and I’d give it extra points for excellent bundled software. Still, I’d have to caution buyers against its limitations. The EasyPhoto Drive is designed to make it easy to scan a bunch of 4x6 or 5x7 photos, and it’s pretty good at doing that! But what if you find yourself needing more? A flatbed scanner might take up desk space, but it can scan those same 4x6 prints along with 8x10s, documents, books, or slides. Perhaps Storm was hoping that people who bought PCs with EasyPhoto Drives would love them so much that they’d choose a Storm flatbed or document scanner when they need an upgrade.

So despite my nerd brain knowing that a flatbed scanner is the better buy, I bet I would’ve spent the dough to put a scanner inside my PC anyway. Because then I would have a scanner inside my PC! Who cares if it’s not the most practical choice? Feeding photos into the slot like a kind of reverse Polaroid is an experience that feels futuristic, even though deep down I know it’s a bit of a gimmick. Still, accessories like these are what made computing fun in the 1990s, and I’m glad to have brought back a little bit of that fun to the modern day.