Epson WorkForce DS-30

In most ways, the Epson WorkForce DS-30 portable scanner ($179.99 direct) is simply one more variation on an old standard: a no-frills, portable scanner limited to manual feeding and simplex (one-sided) scans. The one important difference between it and similar portables from five and more years ago is a scan utility with options to send scanned files to the cloud. Whether you need that particular convenience or not, if your scanning needs are light duty enough so you can do without an automatic document feeder (ADF) and duplex (two-sided) scanning, the DS-30 is worth considering.

The advantages of leaving out duplexing and an ADF boil down to small size, low weight, and low price. The DS-30 measures just 1.4 by 10.9 by 2.0 inches (HWD), giving it a smaller footprint than a one-foot ruler, and it weighs 11.2 ounces. As a point of comparison, the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-150 Scan-tini ($295 direct, 4 stars), with duplexing and an ADF, is nearly twice as big and weighs three times as much. If you need the best possible portability, that gives the DS-30 the edge.

Setup
For my tests, I installed the DS-30 on a Windows Vista system. Setup was mostly standard, involving installing the drivers and other software and then connecting the supplied USB cable, which provides power as well as a data connection. However Epson also includes a note saying to go to its Web site to download the latest version of the driver, without telling you how to find it, and without mentioning the Driver Update utility that can do it for you. The quick start guide also tells you to calibrate before scanning, saying only that the instructions are in a User Guide on disc.

Both of these extra steps are more than a little annoying. Ideally both should both be built into the installation program itself. Lacking that, the quick start guide should give more specific instructions, rather than leaving you to fend for yourself. As it is, it makes the installation routine feel unfinished, and some people may well have a problem with either or both steps. Epson says it will add the calibration instructions to the Quick Start guide in its next printing, and add mention of the Driver Update utility, but can't predict when the next printing will be.

Software and Scanning
The DS-30 comes with an assortment of software, including Abbyy FineReader Sprint 9.0 for optical character recognition (OCR), NewSoft Presto! BizCard 5.0 for business card management, and Twain and WIA drivers. The drivers will work with nearly any program with a scan command to let you scan directly into the program.

Epson also includes the Epson Scan utility and Epson Document Capture Pro for scanning. Epson Scan lets you save files in JPG, image PDF, and an assortment of other image formats. Document Capture Pro offers a similar list of formats, adding multi-page Tiff. However, I'd argue that it's less useful as a scan utility than it is for its ability to send files to an FTP site or to EverNote, Google Docs, or Microsoft SharePoint. Also worth mention is that it will send files that are already on your hard drive, not just newly scanned documents.

Of course, the most useful format for scanned documents is typically either searchable PDF for document management or Word?and sometimes Excel?if you want to edit the text. FineReader will not only let you open an image file to recognize the text, it will let you scan and save to these formats with a single command, which is the approach I used for most tests. The exception, of course, was for business cards, which I scanned from BizCard.

Performance
Scan speed for manual feed scanners is almost meaningless, since the real speed depends on how fast you can manually feed the paper. The actual scan, however, is easy enough to time, and took about 15 seconds per page at the default 300 pixels per inch (ppi) and grayscale mode. As a point of reference, that's a bit slower than the 9 seconds per page that I measured for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 ($199 direct, 3.5 stars). It's a lot slower than the P150 at 10.3 pages per minute (ppm), or nearly 6 seconds per page, with no extra time for manually feeding pages.

Very much on the plus side, the DS-30 did will on OCR accuracy, reading the text on both our Arial and Times New Roman test pages at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake. It also did reasonably well for business cards, making no mistakes on about half the cards I tested with, and only 1 or 2 mistakes on most of the rest.

It's hard to get excited about a scanner that?except for the software?is so similar to scanners that I reviewed at least eight years ago. Even so, if a simplex, manual- feed scanner is what you need, the Epson WorkForce DS-30 is a prime candidate. It comes with an assortment of software that takes best advantage of the hardware, and is unquestionably a highly capable scanner at an attractive price.

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