The Epson WorkForce GT-1500 ($349.99 direct) represents a new direction for Epson. As the name implies, this scanner is office-centric rather than photocentric, and it's aimed at small offices rather than any of Epson's usual target markets: home users, graphic artists, and photographers. Don't think that Epson is fumbling around in unknown territory, however. The GT-1500 is a well-designed package that's potentially attractive to anyone who needs a desktop document scanner for a small or home office.

Most document scanners are strictly sheet-fed, simply because most documents consist of stacks of individual sheets of paper. The GT-1500, however, includes both a 40-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and a letter-size flatbed. The flatbed can be useful if you need to scan book or magazine pages or other originals that won't go through a sheet-feeder.

Setting up the scanner is straightforward. It measures a compact 4.8 by 18.5 by 12.5 inches (HWD), which is impressively small for a scanner with both an ADF and a flatbed, and it weighs just 8.6 pounds. Like some other document scanners with flatbeds—notably, the closely competitive Canon DR-1210C—it's designed to sit in landscape orientation as you face it, with the front panel on one of the long sides and the lid opening toward the back.

To set up the GT-1500, simply run the automated installation routine from disc, plug in the power cord and a USB cable, and let Windows recognize the scanner. I installed it on a Windows XP system, but according to Epson, it also comes with drivers for Windows 2000, Vista, and Mac OS 10.3x through 10.5x. For Windows, the trio of Twain, WIA, and ISIS drivers ensures that you can scan directly from virtually any Windows program with a scan command.

The software for Windows includes an optical character recognition (OCR) program (Abbyy FineReader 6.0 Sprint Plus), a document management program (ScanSoft PaperPort version 11), and Epson's own scan utility. For the Mac, the disc also includes a Twain driver and OCR software, but no document management program.

You can start a scan from a program, from Epson's scan utility, or from one of the four scan buttons on the front panel. The copy button brings up a copy utility on the PC; the PDF button scans to your choice of image PDF or searchable PDF format; and the e-mail button creates a new message using your PC's e-mail program, adding the scanned document as an attachment. There's also a generic scan button that brings up the Epson scan utility, so you can scan to a file. Available formats include Bitmap, JPEG, Multi-TIFF, TIFF, and PDF.

The GT-1500's optical scan resolution is 1,200 pixels per inch (ppi) for scanning from the flatbed, but the software limits the scanner to 600 ppi for scanning from the ADF. This is a bit unusual, but 600 ppi is typical for document scanners and is more than enough resolution for scanning documents. It's even more than enough for scanning photos, unless you plan to enlarge them significantly.

I should also mention that although you can use the GT-1500 flatbed for photos, the scanner doesn't come with a photo editor. So, by definition, the package of hardware plus software as sold by Epson isn't really meant for photo scanning. That said, there's nothing to stop you from buying a photo-editing program separately.

It's also worth noting that the Twain driver includes a Professional mode with settings for features like color balance, which are really more appropriate for scanning photos than documents. Because the scanner doesn't come with its own photo-editing software, and the software itself affects the suitability for scanning photos, I didn't test or rate the GT-1500 for photos. I scanned two photos to disc, however, and opened them in Photoshop, just to get a sense of the scan quality. In both cases, colors were a little washed out.

For document scanning, the GT-1500 is rated at 20 pages per minute (ppm) at 200 ppi in black-and-white mode. On my tests, scanning our standard 25-page text document using the scanner's default 300 ppi setting, I clocked it at only 9.4 ppm scanning to a PDF image file. In comparison, the Canon DR-1210C scanned the same document at a slightly faster 11.4 ppm, which is still slow by document scanner standards.

As with most document scanners, if you scan and save directly to a searchable PDF format, the GT-1500 adds a significant amount of time for recognizing the text. In this case, the OCR step added a little over a minute, for a total of 3:46. The DR-1210C with its scanning software took only 4 seconds extra with OCR, for a total of 2:16. Keep in mind, however, that Canon's scan software is unusual in being able to OCR a file in little to no time.

One advantage the GT-1500 has over the Canon scanner is a manual duplexing feature. Even though the ADF scans only one side of the page, you can turn the stack over, scan the second side, and let the software put the odd and even pages in the right order. Unfortunately, the feature is hidden where it's easy to miss if you don't know to look for it, and it's nowhere near as automatic as it should be, requiring several manual steps. If you need to scan both sides of a multipage document infrequently enough that you can't justify the cost of a duplexing scanner, there's a good chance you'll have to relearn the details every time you use the feature.

The GT-1500 also loses points for its documentation, which is strictly electronic. It's hard to read the instructions on your computer screen while you're trying to use the scan utility on the same screen. Another issue is that the instructions are filled with links to other pages, so you have to keep jumping back and forth to find all the details.

Worse, the manual contains some potentially misleading information. In particular, it tells you to pre-scan the first page of each document and then adjust settings before you scan the entire document. As it turns out, this is meant only as a suggestion for ensuring scan quality, but the manual makes it sound as if it's something you need to do with every document. If you've never used a document scanner before, you might not realize you can ignore this step and save a tremendous amount of time.

On balance, the less-than-ideal design choices for documentation and manual duplexing are far outweighed by the GT-1500's core capabilities—including having manual duplexing at all. The Canon DR-1210C is faster, particularly for scanning to a searchable PDF file, but it's limited to scanning only one side of a page. (Vista users will also find that the Canon comes with limited Vista support.) For those needing a document scanner with a flatbed, and who scan mostly one-sided documents but occasionally need to scan two-sided ones as well, the GT-1500 is a highly attractive and surprisingly affordable choice.

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