The Epson WorkForce DS-6500($849.00 at Amazon) offers something that most document scanners in its price range and below don't. Along with the automatic document feeder (ADF) that you would expect, it adds a slightly larger than letter-size flatbed so you can also scan bound pages or other originals that won't fit through the ADF. If you need the flatbed, that's enough to put the DS-6500 on your radar. It may even be enough to put it on your short list.

In many ways, the DS-6500 is one step up from the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-2020U, another document scanner that also offers a flatbed. The DS-6500 is designed for slightly more heavy-duty scanning, however, with double the paper capacity for the ADF, at 100 sheets, and a faster rated speed. Both scanners can duplex, scanning both sides of a page at the same time, but the DS-6500's rating is five pages per minute (ppm) faster, at 25 ppm and 50 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scans.

Basics, Setup, and Software

The DS-6500 is a bit larger than the Canon DR-2020U, at 8.5 by 19.4 by 14.1 (HWD) inches. That makes it a little big to share a desk with comfortably, but small enough to keep nearby. Setup is standard fare, with a USB connection as the only choice, at least in the standard configuration. There's also an optional Network Scan Module ($349.99 direct), which Epson did not provide with the review unit. For my tests, I connected the scanner by USB to a system running Windows Vista.

Epson includes essentially the same software with the DS-6500 as with the Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S55 that I reviewed last year.

The Document Capture Pro scan utility offers more than basic scanning, including tricks like letting you add pages to, or delete them from, a group of already scanned pages, or even change the order the pages are in. You can also use it to send scans to an assortment of destinations, including a printer, an FTP site, SharePoint, Evernote, Google Docs, an email attachment, or disk. The choices for file formats are searchable PDF (sPDF), image PDF, JPG, BMP, TIFF, and Multi-TIFF.

The only application program Epson includes is Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint, for optical character recognition (OCR). However, in addition to the scan utility, the scanner comes with Twain and WIA drivers, and you can download ISIS drivers from the Epson Web site. Between the three drivers, you can scan with virtually any Windows program that includes a scan command.

Scan Speed

The optical resolution for the DS-6500 is 600 pixels per inch (ppi) for scanning with the ADF or 1,200 ppi for scanning on the flatbed. Either one is overkill for most document scanning applications. The default settings, which I used for my tests, are 200 ppi for Document Capture Pro and 300 ppi for FineReader. The scanner's 25 ppm, 50 ipm rating is for scanning at any color setting—monochrome, grayscale, or color—at either 200 or 300 ppi.

For my tests, using our standard 25-sheet text document, and scanning to image PDF format with Document Capture Pro, I clocked the scanner at a higher-than-rated 26.8 ppm for simplex (one-sided) scans and 50 ipm for duplex. You can count that as a plus. Hitting the claimed speed on our tests isn't unusual, but also isn't guaranteed. The Canon DR-2020U, for example, with a 20 ppm and 40 ipm rating, managed only 18.3 ppm and 36.1 ipm.

Scanning with Text Recognition

Of course, scanning to image PDF format isn't the whole story. For most document scanning applications, saving to searchable PDF is much more useful. As with most scanners, however, adding the recognition step with the DS-6500 added significant extra time.

Using FineReader to scan, recognize the text, and save the file took a total of 2 minutes 36 seconds. That counts as reasonably fast. However, some scanners don't add any time for recognizing text, which gives them a tremendous advantage. The Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula DR-C125, for example, took only 1:00 whether scanning to PDF or sPDF. More significantly, the Canon DR-2020U, with its lower rated speed, took 1:23 with either format, making it both slower and faster than the DS-6500, depending on the format you want to scan to.

Also under the category of text recognition, the DS-6500 did well for accuracy on our OCR test, reading our Times New Roman test page at sizes as small as 8 points and our Arial test page at sizes as small as 5 points without a mistake. It also did better than many scanners on some additional fonts we test with, but don't include in our official scores.

I'd be more enthusiastic about this scanner if it didn't add quite so much time for text recognition for sPDF files. However, adding time is the norm, and the ability of some scanners to avoid it is unusual. That said, if you need a document scanner with a flatbed, and are considering the Epson WorkForce DS-6500, you should take a look at the Canon DR-2020U also. If you don't need to scan to sPDF format very often, or you can make good use of a 100-sheet ADF instead of the 50-sheet version on the Canon model, the Epson WorkForce DS-6500 will likely be the better fit.

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Further Reading

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• Get Organized: Choose the Right Scanner for Going Paperless