Pros & Cons
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- Automatic document feeder.
- Fast, rated at 65 pages per minute and 130 images per minute.
- Excellent text recognition and document management.
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- Only included application software is the light version of an optical character recognition program.
Epson WorkForce DS-860 Color Document Scanner Specs
| Automatic Document Feeder | |
| Maximum Optical Resolution | 600 pixels |
| Maximum Scan Area | Legal |
| Mechanical Resolution | 600 |
If you need a scanner for a midsize office or large workgroup, put the Epson WorkForce DS-860 ($1,099) on your must-see list. In addition to its fast speed—rated at 65 pages per minute (ppm), or 130 images per minute (ipm) for duplex (two-sided) scans, with one image on each side of the page—the DS-860 offers an 80-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), a capable scan utility, and excellent text recognition accuracy. The combination makes it our new Editors' Choice for moderate to heavy-duty scanning in a midsize office.
The DS-860 offers mostly incremental advantages over the Xerox DocuMate 5460, which is the scanner it replaces as our preferred choice. Its rated speed is only 5ppm faster, for example, and its ADF holds only five additional pages. The key difference is that its daily duty cycle is 6,000 sheets, rather than the Xerox 5460's 4,000, making it appropriate for heavier duty-use. That's just enough of an extra to give the DS-860 a slim, but significant, edge.
One other obvious point of comparison is the Epson WorkForce DS-760 Color Document Scanner that I recently reviewed. The two models look like twins and share most of the same features, including the same bundled software. However, for roughly a 20-percent difference in price, the DS-860 offers a 45-percent increase in rated speed (from 45ppm to 65ppm) and a 33-percent increase in daily duty cycle (from 4,500 to 6,000 sheets) making it the obvious choice for heavier-duty needs.
Setup and Software
At a casual glance, the DS-860 could pass for a personal desktop scanner. It weighs in at 8 pounds 13 ounces, and measures 8.1 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches (HWD) with the trays closed.
Setup is standard. Plug in the power cord, install the software from disc, and plug in the supplied USB cable. Epson lists the OS requirements as Windows XP through 8, in both 32-and 64-bit versions. However, Epson, unlike other manufacturers, insists that I 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 PC running Windows Vista.
Epson provides the identical set of software with the DS-860 as with the Epson DS-760, including its Document Capture Pro scan utility, which comes with almost all of Epson's current WorkForce scanner models.
In addition to basic control over scan settings, like resolution and color mode, Document Capture Pro offers features like letting you add pages to or delete them from a group of already scanned pages. It also offers a long list of choices for file formats and destinations to save to, and it lets you send the same scan to multiple destinations.
Also included with the scanner is Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint, which is a light version of a full-function optical character recognition (OCR) program, and both Twain and WIA drivers, with ISIS drivers available on Epson's website.
Performance
As with most document scanners, the optical resolution for the DS-860 is 600 pixels per inch (ppi). For my tests, using Document Capture Pro in each case, I set the resolution to 300ppi and the color mode to Auto. The good news is that the DS-860 is significantly faster than its rating. Unfortunately, as with all document scanners, that doesn't include the lag between giving the scan command and the scan starting or the lag between the last page coming out and the completion of writing the file to disk.
Scanning in image PDF format and using our standard 25-sheet text document, I clocked the DS-860 at an impressive 73ppm for simplex (one-sided) scans without the lag time, and 146ipm for duplex scans. With the lag, which is the time you'll actually see, it managed a still fast 54ppm for simplex mode and 91ipm for duplex. In comparison, using speeds that include the lag, the Xerox 5460 was a little slower for simplex scans, at 47ppm, and essentially tied for duplex scans. The Epson DS-760 was a lot slower, at only 42ppm and 83ipm.
As with most scanners, when you scan directly to searchable PDF format, which is generally more useful for document management applications, the DS-860 takes extra time for recognizing the text. I timed it at 1 minute 12 seconds, which is basically tied with the Xerox scanner, at 1:16.
The DS-860 did an excellent job with OCR accuracy. The combination of scanner and software read both our Times New Roman and Arial test pages at sizes as small as 6 points without a mistake.
If you don't need quite the level of scan capability the Epson WorkForce DS-860 Color Document Scanner offers, be sure to consider the Epson DS-760 or the Xerox DocuMate 5445, which is our Editors' Choice for a small office or workgroup. You should also take a look at the Xerox 5460, which comes with more application programs than the DS-860. If you need the software, that can make it a better value. For heavier-duty scanning, however, the DS-860's higher duty cycle makes it the obvious choice and our Editors' Choice as well.