Description
Boasting the fastest scan speeds in its class 1 , the WorkForce ES-300W compact duplex document scanner keeps you organized at the office and on the road. Wirelessly scan 2-sided documents, business cards and receipts to laptops, tablets and smartphones (2). Easily scan to cloud storage accounts (2), or to searchable PDFs and editable Word and Excel files using the included Epson ScanSmart Software (2). Featuring a 20-page Auto Document Feeder, the versatile ES-300W performs efficient batch scanning up to 25 ppm/50 ipm (3). Built-in Epson Image Processing Technology offers intelligent color and image adjustments. And, you can use AC, battery or USB power (4), for ultimate flexibility. 1. In its class, as compared to other portable consumer document scanners with an ADF, using the AC adapter and power cable, priced under $300 USD (MSRP) sold into the United States and Canada as of June 2016. Excludes other Epson products. 2. Wirelessly scan to smartphones or tablets (Android/iOS devices) via the Epson DocumentScan App, wirelessly scan to the cloud, PCs or Mac with Epson ScanSmart Software installed on the connected Windows PC or Mac. Internet connection is required. ScanSmart supports Windows 10 (32-bit, 64-bit), Windows 8/8.1 (32-bit, 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit) SP1 and Mac OS X 10.11.x to macOS 10.13.x. 3. Based on letter-sized scans at 300 dpi using the AC adapter or USB 3.0 cable. 4. USB power requires USB 3.0 connection port on your computer. 5. For convenient and reasonable recycling options, visit our official site. 6. SmartWay is an innovative partnership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that reduces greenhouse gases and other air pollutants and improves fuel efficiency.
From the manufacturer
sminla –
(I thought it was the) Best portable duplex scanner in its categoryEDITS 10/2019: I loved the features, small size, speed and performance of this scanner as I indicated in my original 5-star review. There are 2 reasons I’m dropping that to 3 stars, essentially one star for each of the two reasons, both of which I consider major issues:1. There is a design or manufacturing quality issue. After almost exactly one year (barely in warranty) a 1″ wide black band appeared on side 2 of all 2-sided scans on the far left side. Epson honoured the warranty and replaced with a refurbished unit. 8 months later (of really light use) the SAME problem appears (slightly different position of the band) on the replacement unit. Of course, it’s no longer in warranty. Epson confirms it’s a hardware failure but offers only a 15% discount on a new product purchased within 7 days (right … “fool me once …”). So 2 out of 2 scanners of this model experienced the same failure in 8-11 months. (Oh, the card feeder also stopped working in the first scanner.) It continues to work fine, for the time being, as a 1-sided scanner.2. The edge detection mechanism is really messed up. Instead of using the physical page edge, it apparently uses software as well to detect transitions in the page black/white density to detect a page edge. The algorithm is really bad. If your material has large black areas or is almost all white with light text, it will arbitrarily end the page prematurely, or split the scan into two pages. Even more stupidly, it does this even if you set the page length to a fixed length which matches the actual paper size. And YET more stupidly, if you are doing 1-sided scanning and the BACK side (the side you are NOT scanning) has these large black areas, it will still mess up (i.e., split into two pages with about 1/2″ in the middle of the page lost) the side you are scanning! Admittedly 90% of scans don’t have this problem, but the 10% that have these characteristics results in major frustration since there is no easy way to “persuade” the scanner to scan the sheet properly. I sometimes have to scan those sheets on a different scanner then use a PDF editor program to merge the pages manually (which of course takes 10x as long and not really the way one wants to use a scanner).ORIGINAL REVIEW (APPROX END 2017 AGO)The (1) Epson ES-300W is my third portable scanner of this portable format, the other two being the (2) Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300 (which I still have though it has some dead pixels now after several years of use) and the (3) Canon P-215II. (For completeness, I’ll mention that in this category of portable duplex scanners, there is also the (4) Brother ADS1000W and the similar (5) Brother ADS1500W, neither of which I have tried.)Short version: The Epson is vastly superior to the Fujitsu in every respect. While the Canon is even more compact (though somewhat more fragile), it has a design flaw that mainly affects photo scanning, which ruled it out for me. You can see my review of the Canon at this link: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1WC16W15EKYI3/ref=cm_cr_rdp_permHere I will review the Epson ES-300W, mostly by comparing it with the Fujitsu s1300 (over which it wins in every possible regard). I loved my Fujitsu for many years but didn’t realize its limitations (it’s an old product and badly needs updating) until I bought the Epson to replace it when it started losing a few pixels.Here are all the ways in which the Epson ES-300W is superior to the Fujitsu s1300. Both are in a similar price category and almost exactly the same size.EPSON SUPERIOR- Scanning speed: Epson about 5x (estimated) faster at 300 dpi.- Scanning noise: Epson is silent, the paper glides through (with the Fujitsu you hear the rattle of the stepper motor)- Compatibility: Epson is TWAIN compatible for use with any scanning software. Fujitsu is NOT TWAIN compatible and hence forces you to use their software (which has many limitations).- Scanning flexibility: Epson lets you scan natively as TIFF, JPG, BMP, PDF and more; Fujitsu only as JPG and PDF. With Epson JPG you can choose quality level to 99%; with Fujitsu you can choose 4 levels of compression and even with the lowest compression (highest quality), photos are somewhat lossy (Epson lets you save as TIFF if you want, so you don’t lose any detail in compression). Epson scanner driver lets you adjust a host of parameters such as brightness, contrast, gamma, right at scan time; Fujitsu doesn’t.- Card scanning: Epson has a dedicated slot for scanning business and plastic cards; Fujitsu doesn’t (I don’t find it very useful for my applications, but it’s there).- USB 3.0 for Epson (vs. 2.0 for Fujitsu). In addition to transfer speed, this gives the huge advantage to the Epson of being able to operate without an A/C adaptor, connected just to the computer’s USB 3.0 (Fujitsu allows you to scan without a power adaptor too, but more slowly and two USB 2.0 cables connected to TWO USB ports).- Built-in rechargeable battery for Epson; none for Fujitsu.- WiFi or USB 3.0 connect for Fujitsu; USB 2.0 only for Fujitsu.EPSON AND FUJITSU EQUAL- Physical size- Maximum optical resolution 600 dpi- One-pass Duplex scanningFUJITSU SUPERIOR- Nothing I’ve found yetSummary. Go with the Epson–it’s a no-brainer. The only improvement I can think of, is the addition of some internal memory to permit scanning (in some default “auto” mode) with no computer and just the scanner standalone–it’s a logical addition since it already operates cable-less with the rechargeable battery. It’s a shame they didn’t add this simple and low-cost feature.
Philip Hakim –
Great Hardware, terrible software!Setup:This scanner is extremely difficult to set up (MacOS Sierra) for wireless use. I had to hunt down an app called EpsonNet Config, which wasn’t listed under the support page for the ES-300W, by looking it up under an older scanner model. The only other way to set it up is to use WPS (Wifi Protected Setup) which is a security risk and should be disabled on your router.OCR in Wireless mode:One of the great features of this scanner is the ABBYY software which delivers excellent OCR results. However, ABBYY software is unusable in wireless mode. Epson hasn’t made an ICA driver for these scanners yet. In wireless mode, the scanner doesn’t show up in the Mac Image Capture Application, so it doesn’t show up in the ABBYY application. The scanner does not show up on Apple’s list of devices that MacOS can automatically download software for. Furthermore, if you check older devices on Epson’s support website you will find a standalone “ICA” driver. The ES-X00 series do not have a similar driver available for download as of now (on Epson Support website).This is extremely frustrating. It is not possible to use this scanner in wireless mode with the ABBYY software to get superior OCR. ABBYY only works when connected via USB. In wireless mode you are forced to use Epson’s software and it’s inferior OCR. When will Epson release a driver enabling the full functionality that they claim??
NeoteriX –
A compact scanner with great features but ultimately terrible reliability. Disappointing.This scanner ticked off many of the boxes of a scanner I was looking for: Compact and stores easily, automatic document feeding, double sided scanning, and Android app support. Though the Android app is not as polished and user friendly as could be, I was able to eventually figure out the right settings and it passably got the job done. It helped to declutter a box full of old documents….six months later, the scanner developed the wide black bar (see my uploaded photos) as now seen by others here. Though frustrating, I was able to easily prove the problem to Epson technical support and a replacement unit was quickly on its way. Well, about thirteen months after I received my replacement unit (with much lighter use over that time), the replacement unit has developed the same problem.This is really unfortunate, as the feature-set is great and I had a compact and streamlined process for scanning multiple pages onto my phone and uploading it to the cloud. It’s just that having experienced this problem twice (and this is a problem that is clearly seen my many users), there is a real reliability problem here that makes it impossible to recommend this product.I regretfully have to say that folks should absolutely stay away from this—and I’m back on the hunt for the holy grail of compact, feature-filled scanners.
François Charron –
VeryI bought this scanner wanting to replace my current Doxie Go Wifi for something faster, and reading on the Wirecutter website that it was “best document scanner for most people”. My goal was to quickly give it piles after piles of various papers to scan, and to sort the result afterwards on my computer, as I used to do in Doxie.The scanner itself performs 300 DPI duplex scans VERY fast. It is actually quite impressive. It is possible to scan to up to 600 DPI at a significant speed cost, and up to 1200 DPI by losing all additional features like deskewing, paper size detection and such.My biggest gripe with this product lies on the software side. The various applications bundled with it, whether on Windows or Mac, are very unpolished. I found it very difficult to achieve what I thought was a simple task: scan first, assemble pages as PDFs after. I tried Epson Scan 2, Document Scanner, ABBYY Finereader Sprint and Presto! Bizcard (the last two need to be downloaded via the software updater, which sometimes doesn’t work at all). All of those applications have their own quirks, which makes it very complicated to accomplish such a simple task. It goes from having to create a document before starting a scan, to shuffling the page ordering of the scan for some reason.After many evenings wasted trying various third party tools, I ended up figuring out a way to achieve my goal on my Mac, by scanning 1 PDF per page with Epson Scan, and then assembling the PDFs together as I see fit using an Automator script, which I mapped to a keyboard shortcut (so I can quickly “staple” my PDFs from the Finder). This script then sends the resulting multi-page PDF to Devonthink, which performs OCR on it and indexes it.Overall, I am a bit disappointed with my purchase, but there is no way I was going to pay 600$ for a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Now that I have an efficient workflow, I’ll manage.
bretto2004 –
I wanted to give 4 or 5 stars butThis thing suffers from phantom paper jam errors after a year. The troubling thing is that Epson half covers the sensors with a tiny piece of plastic, and the little pieces are glued on, so these little plastic pieces were meant to be there. I cannot fathom why they would do this, and in the end it didn’t matter.I had cleaned the unit and it was working again. Then more jam errors and I removed the plastic pieces covering the sensors and the thing worked for a week, then all of a sudden it was stuck in paper jam error mode. Epson customer support said i was using the wrong kind of paper, which co-incidentally they told me the same thing on an ecotank all-in-one. Been using the same paper as always, It isn’t the paper Epson, you have bad sensors or something.Thing is, i might actually buy another one. Its a well built little scanner, it scanned batches of documents well, and i liked the software for it. They need to shift the engineers from the ecotank division into the adf division because we’ve had 3 epson scanners in the last 5 years and they all get phantom paper jam errors.
EDWARD J PRICHARD –
Mechanical design quality is poor, screws up almost every pageHardware is very flimsy. As a result of the low quality, it skews or damages almost every page that goes into it. You can’t just set a sheet in it and press the button. You have to hold it just so, or it doesn’t see it. And then to line things up, you have the tiniest pieces of plastic to act as guides, and they don’t do their job well because they’re so small. If the paper has been folded to fit in an envelope (like almost everything I’m trying to scan), then they will not be handled well. I bought this because it was supposed to be way more convenient than a flat-bed, but that’s not the case. A flat-bed would work every time. This screws up almost every time. I’m sending it back and trying the ES-500W instead. That other model looks like it’s designed better. Now I have to wait for that to come in.
C. Vuong –
Wireless Feature is FrustratingSo in the end… We gave up on using the wireless feature and just plug the scanner in physically. But… the scanner is incredibly fast, the machine itself is small and it’s super simple to use. After an hour of trying to work the wireless feature and giving up, we could have just opted to save a few bucks for the non-wireless model. That’s me, hopefully you can connect your device! I do wish a cover of some sort was offered in box but I guess that’s asking for too much?
Robert –
Regretting my purchaseI’ve been using this scanner for a year and half and I feel compelled to write a negative review.It’s not intuitive to set up at all. I set it up about two months ago and redoing it now, the process is proving again very frustrating. Wireless setup is terrible actually.The software is awkward to use. I only scan to my computer, still every time I have to jump through hoops to not scan to email, not scan to some esoteric other utility… Once I renamed a scan ‘o[something]’. That never went away. All of my scans since have been prefaced with ‘o’.It does a bad job at picking one sheet at the time.I think it picks the paper orientation automatically because no matter what way I put the paper, it scan upside down +/-80%? of the time.Even when it picks up only one page, feeding is poor. Scans often come out skewed.I had a Fujitsu before that I gave a coworker who scans more than me, I sorely miss it. It had none of these problems.