Hands-on review: Epson WorkForce DS-780N scanner

Want a fast, compact, high quality desktop document scanner for your business? Epson may have just the thing for you with their Workforce DS-780N.

Whilst we all aspire to a paperless office, people do love to send us paper documents. You have a choice of storage solutions: filing cabinets full of documents that you'll never read or scan the lot as save them as pdf documents.

Without the space (or cash) for an industrial MFD, in the past I've resorted to watching as my consumer all-in-one printer/scanner slowly sucks in page after page of documents, or even worse, having to individually scan each page on a flatbed.

When I first opened up the review sample, I was surprised at the small size of the DS-780N. Being a commercial scanner I was expecting a chunky bit of kit that would dominate my desk.

The device is tiny, not much bigger than a fancy office telephone. It's small enough to have sitting on your desk, at arm's length, ready to scan your paper before putting it through the shredder. The scanner makes document archiving easy.

Don't let its size fool you, the DS-780N is a big scanner in a small chassis. The documents feeder can accommodate 100 sheets of paper from business cards size to A4. Whilst I didn't check it, apparently, it'll scan documents over 6m long! The scanner also handles duplex scanning in one pass, allowing colour scanning speeds of forty-five pages per minute at 300dpi.

The scanner can be connected directing to a PC via USB, to your network via a wired connection. The lack of a wi-fi option is a bit annoying, but I can sort-of understand the need for speed over connectivity. Direct wired connection to a network or to a PC via USB enables those blistering scanning speed to be transferred all the way to the user's workflow.

Setup is easy, with Epson Navi installing your drivers, Epson Scan 2 and performing a firmware update. You can also access the scanner's features via the colour LCD touch screen on the front of the device.

Epson Scan 2 allows you to scan documents to multiple file format in including PDF. The software's OCR capabilities let you convert your documents into searchable PDFs, essential for archiving important reports that you may need to pull information from in the future. It's feeder-only scanning capabilities are no going to suit everybody, but, for them, there are MDFs.

The DS-780N is a fully-featured, professional document scanner that can fit on your desktop, and it does the job very well. It's perfect for people that habitually scan documents as part of their everyday workflow without having to leave their desk.

The Epson Workforce DS-780N is available now for AUD/NZ$1,299.00.