The Epson DS-530 Color Duplex Document Scanner ($399.99) is a capable, inexpensive document scanner for personal or small-office use. In testing, it met or exceeded its rated speed (which is slightly higher than some similar budget scanners we have reviewed), and it lost almost no time in the text recognition stage of converting a file into a searchable PDF. The DS-530 does a solid job in business card reading, and only its mediocre optical character recognition (OCR) performance stands in the way of it earning an Editors' Choice award.

Design and Features

The DS-530 ($349.00 at Amazon) looks and feels like a typical budget desktop document scanner, at just 8 pounds and 6.9 by 11.6 by 6.6 inches (HWD) with the trays closed. As its name implies, the DS-530 is a color scanner capable of duplex (two-sided) as well as simplex (one-sided) scanning. As with most models in this category, the top cover opens to turn into an input tray. A second tray slides forward from the front-bottom portion to become an output tray. Fully open, it adds about 6 inches to the depth, but that actually takes up less additional desktop space than if you scan with the tray closed and have to leave room for the paper to come out on your desktop.

Setup and Software

Setup is typical for a USB-connected scanner. Plug in the power cord, install the software from disc, and connect the supplied USB 3.0 cable to your PC.

Software includes two scan utilities (Epson Scan and Document Capture Pro), a business card management program (NewSoft Presto! BizCard), an OCR program (Abbyy FineReader Sprint) and both Twain and WIA drivers, with a Windows ISIS driver available for download from the Epson website. At least one of the three drivers will work with virtually any Windows program that includes a scan command.

While Epson Scan offers basic scan capability, Document Capture Pro is somewhat more sophisticated, and I used it for most of my testing. It lets you send scans to an assortment of destinations in a variety of formats. The destination choices include a folder on a drive, a printer, an FTP site, or an email attachment, plus cloud destinations such as a Web Folder, a SharePoint server, Evernote, and Google Drive. The supported file formats include PDF, searchable PDF, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, Multi-TIFF, PNG, and Microsoft Office formats DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX.

Scan Speed

The DS-530's rated speed is 35 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex and 70 images per minute (ipm)—where each side of a page counts as one image—for duplex scanning. I tested it over a USB 3.0 connection to our testbed, which runs Windows 10 Professional, using the default 200ppi resolution. Scanning to image PDF format with Document Capture Pro, and timing from the moment I gave the scan command to the moment the program finished writing the file to the hard drive, I clocked the DS-530 at 31ppm for scanning in simplex and 62ipm in duplex. Subtracting the lag times (between giving the command and the scan actually starting, and between it finishing and the file being written to disk) gives a raw scan speed that's a little faster than the DS-530's rating: 38ppm for simplex and 76ipm for duplex.

See How We Test Scanners

For most document management applications, the more critical speed for a scanner is how long it takes to scan and save to searchable PDF (sPDF) format rather than image PDF format. With most scanners, the text recognition step adds a significant amount of time. The DS-530 did better than usual, increasing the time for scanning our standard 25-sheet, 50-page test document from 47 seconds for image PDF to 1 minute, 1 second, for sPDF.

Its results were a tad faster than those of the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C225 ($435.64 at Amazon) , which has a lower rated speed of 25ppm for simplex and 50ipm for duplex. When we tested the DR-C225, it was over a USB 2.0 connection on our old testbed. The DR-C225 scanned our test file to image PDF format in 1:02 and to searchable PDF in 1:09. The results were also considerably better than we saw with the Epson WorkForce DS-520 ($359.00 at Amazon) , which scanned our file to image PDF in 56 seconds but took 1:33 to scan to searchable PDF.

Other Test Results

The DS-530's OCR accuracy is best described as mediocre, which makes it acceptable for most purposes, but not impressive. The combination of the scanner and Document Capture Pro read both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 10 points without a mistake, but was erratic with our nonstandard test fonts, reading two of them well but having serious problems with the other three. The Canon DR-C225 read our samples for both Times New Roman and Arial at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake, and did considerably better than the DS-530 on our nonstandard fonts.

In business card scanning, the DS-530 did a good job. Although most cards in our test suite had at least one error, few had more than two or three. It scanned small stacks of business cards smoothly.

Conclusion

The Epson WorkForce DS-530 Color Document Scanner has improvements over the Epson DS-520, including support for USB 3.0 and faster rated (and tested) speeds. It's a tad faster than the Editors' Choice Canon DR-C225 in scanning to both image and searchable PDF formats in our testing, and it sells at a slightly lower price. It falls well short of the DR-C225's OCR performance, however, so if you need to scan to Word, the DR-C225 is a better choice. It holds on to its Editors' Choice, but the DS-530 is a superb and cost-effective alternative for all other uses.

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