If you need a document scanner for a workgroup or small office, the Epson WorkForce DS-760 ($899) should be on your short list. It's both small enough to share a desk with and highly capable, with an 80-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) and a fast speed that can quickly turn stacks of paper into digital files. Add in its good-to-excellent performance for text recognition and document management, and it can be a good fit for almost any small office.

The DS-760 comes in a close second overall to the Xerox DocuMate 5445 , which is our current Editors' Choice document scanner for moderate to heavy-duty use in a small office or workgroup. It also comes out ahead in some ways, with slightly faster speed in our tests, even though both claim the same rated speed, at 45 pages per minute (ppm) and 90 image per minute (ipm), with one image on each side of a page.

The key advantage for the Xerox 5445, and what keeps it in place as our preferred pick, is that it comes with a world-class PDF utility and full-function application programs for document management and optical character recognition (OCR). If you get the DS-760, you have to buy equivalent programs separately if you need them.

Setup and Software
Measuring only 8.1 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches (HWD) with the trays closed,the DS-560 is small enough to easily share a desk with. It weighs 8 pounds 13 ounces.

Setup is standard for a USB-connected scanner: Plug in the power cord, install the software from disc, and connect the supplied USB cable. Epson lists the OS requirements on its website as both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows XP through Windows 8. However, unlike other manufacturers, Epson insists that we install all current updates for testing, so the OS requirements should be read as needing fully updated versions of these operating systems. For my tests I used a system running Windows Vista.

As with other Epson WorkForce scanners, including the less expensive Epson WorkForce DS-560 Wireless Color Document Scanner, for example, Epson includes its Document Capture Pro scan utility with the DS-760.

Document Capture Pro goes well beyond basic scan control. It will let you add pages to or delete them from a group of already scanned pages, change the order the pages are in, and save them to a wider variety of file formats than many scan utilities (JPG, BMP, image PDF, searchable PDF, TIFF, Multi-TIFF, PNG, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX).

It will also let you choose one or more destinations for each scan. The possibilities include a file on disk, an email program (as an attachment), a printer, an FTP site, any application program that supports one of the formats Document Capture Pro can save to, and various cloud destinations (currently a Web Folder, SharePoint, Evernote, OneNote, Google Drive, and SugarSync, but Epson says it will be adding more, with an update that will be available on its website.)

In addition to Document Capture Pro, the DS-760 comes with only a stripped-down version of an OCR program and both Twain and WIA drivers, with ISIS drivers available on Epson's website. At least one of the three drivers should work with virtually any program that includes a scan command.

Performance

The DS-760's optical resolution is 600 pixels per inch (ppi). For my tests, using Document Capture Pro,I set the utility to 300ppi and auto detection for color mode.

See How We Test Scanners

Scanning our standard 25-sheet test document to image PDF format, the DS-760 was only a little slower than its rated speed, at 42ppm for simplex (one-sided) scans and 83ipm for duplex (two-sided) scans, even including both the lag between giving the command and starting the scan and the lag between finishing the scan and finishing saving the file to disk. (Rated speeds don't include the lag.) In comparison, the Xerox 5445 came in at 39ppm for simplex and 75ipm for duplex, making it essentially tied in a practical sense, with a difference of only 3 to 4 seconds for the 25 pages in each case.

As with most scanners, both of these models take extra time for scanning to searchable PDF (sPDF) format, which is generally more useful for document management applications. Here again, the two are essentially tied, at 1 minute 15 seconds for the DS-760 and 1:18 for the Xerox 5445.

As another point of comparison, the less expensive Canon imageFormula DR-C225 is a touch faster for scanning to sPDF format, at 1:09 in our tests. This fast speed for sPDF files is one reason it's our Editors' Choice for a moderately-priced document scanner for personal or small-office use. However, it's much slower than the Epson and Xerox models for scanning to image PDF format.

The DS-760 also did a more-than-acceptable job with OCR accuracy. The combination of scanner and software read our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 8 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake, matching the Xerox 5445 in both cases.

If you need the application programs the Xerox 5445 comes with, it's clearly the better value, which is why it's our preferred pick. If you don't need the programs, however, it doesn't matter if you pick another scanner that doesn't come with them. That can make the Epson WorkForce DS-760 Color Document Scanner a lot more attractive, with its slightly faster speed making it a more than reasonable choice even with a slightly higher price.