A step down from our recent Editors’ Choice among portable receipt and document scanners, the Epson RapidReceipt RR-70W, the RapidReceipt RR-60 ($219) is a small, relatively fast scanner that gets both data and power via a USB 2.0 connection to your laptop. As the entry-level RapidReceipt model, the RR-60 also comes with the accounting edition of Epson’s ScanSmart scanner interface and document management software. But the RR-70W has all those features plus two necessities for true portability: Wi-Fi and a battery. Given a mere $40 price difference, there’s simply no reason to settle for the RR-60.
Small and Savvy
Epson touts the RR-60 as the “smallest and lightest mobile single-sheet-fed document scanner in its class,” which is also what the company said about one of the RR-60’s predecessors, the DS-70 Portable Document Scanner. Like the DS-70, the smallest and lightest portable scanner I know of, the RR-60 measures 1.3 by 10.7 by 1.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 0.59 pounds, and it has much the same hardware.
The primary difference between these scanners is that the RR-60 comes with the ScanSmart accounting add-on, and the DS-70 does not. You can, however, add the ScanSmart accounting edition to most Epson scanners, including the DS-70, for about $100.
The RR-70W isn’t much bigger than the RR-60. Its battery and wireless radio add just a few ounces to its girth and a couple tenths of an inch to its height and depth. Most competing scanners are bigger: The similarly configured Brother DSMobile DS-740D, for instance, is an inch longer and wider than the RR-60 and weighs almost three times as much.
All these models are single-sheetfed (or manual-sheetfed) devices: You’ll have to load one page at a time, wait for it to scan, and then load another. The more multipage scan jobs you foresee, the less practical the RR-60 and its ilk become, and you should consider a multi-sheetfed device with an automatic document feeder (ADF), such as the Editors’ Choice–winning WorkForce ES-300WR Wireless Document Scanner—Accounting Edition.
Another recent RapidReceipt scanner that debuted with the RR-60 and RR-70W is the Editors’ Choice RapidReceipt RR-600W, a desktop model with a 100-sheet ADF. It’s worth considering if you need accounting features but don’t care so much about portability.
There’s only one button (a Start/Stop toggle) on the RR-60. Lights indicate Automatic Feeding Mode and Ready. Everything else is handled by the bundled software, which we’ll discuss in a moment. The mini-USB port is on the machine’s right end cap.
The left side of the paper path is configured to accept small cards.
As for paper handling, the RR-60 can scan documents up to 8.5 inches wide and up to 72 inches long—great for those receipts that double as Venetian blinds—and its daily duty cycle is 300 sheets.
Excellent Software With Accounting Features
After the RR-60 digitizes your documents, Epson’s ScanSmart software converts that image to editable text and lets you categorize and export it. Though the RR-60 can’t connect to mobile devices, its software bundle is otherwise the same as the RR-70W’s; the RR-70W review has the full rundown of the accounting features that set this receipt scanner apart.
Reasonable Scanning Speed
Epson rates the RR-60 at 10 pages per minute (ppm). Our speed tests aren’t designed for clocking these little single-sheet devices, since so much depends on how reliably the human tester feeds pages to them. Nonetheless, I did my best to put the RR-60 through its paces, testing it over USB 2.0 using Epson ScanSmart on PCMag’s standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.
The RR-60 did manage to scan single pages, even two-sided ones, in around 6 seconds each. Sitting there, meticulously ready to feed each page as the one before it finished scanning, I was able to push through about 12.9 one-sided pages per minute and 24.4 two-sided images per minute (or ipm, where each image is a page side). The RR-60 has an Automatic Feeding Mode that takes each new sheet from your hand and feeds it into the paper path, which makes getting each page started a little easier.
These scores were similar to most of the manual-sheetfed scanners we’ve tested over the past year or so. The RR-70W, for example, came in at 14.2ppm and 26.8ipm, and the Brother DSmobile DS-740D managed 13.5ppm and 27ipm, as did the DS-940DW. Epson’s DS-70 scored 8.2ppm and 18.7ipm.
The RR-60’s performance when scanning these same documents to the more versatile searchable PDF format was about the same as it was for image PDF.
Just as critical to the scanning process is how accurately the optical character recognition (OCR) software converts scanned text to editable text. The RR-60 fell in line with most of the other Epson portable scanners we’ve tested, converting both of our Arial and Times New Roman font tests error-free down to 6 points. Though some scanners have performed slightly better on these test, you will seldom need to scan documents with font sizes smaller than this.
I also tested how well the Accounting add-on scanned, recognized, and exported financial data to usable formats. Text recognition was accurate, but how astutely ScanSmart manipulates the data into your financial program depends primarily on the condition of the documents you’re scanning and what programs you use. Getting your data into QuickBooks and Quicken, for instance, is easy enough, and ScanSmart, after a little initial setup, populates the appropriate fields accurately. When exporting to CSV format, however, you may have to open the files in Excel and do a little field matching. Once you get it all set up correctly, the export/import process should execute smoothly.
Not the Best RapidReceipt Value
With the RR-70W, for $40 more, you get a battery and integrated Wi-Fi, which lets you take the scanner anywhere and easily connect it to multiple computers and mobile devices. Even if you need these features only occasionally, they’re well worth paying the premium for. But if you’re on a strict budget, or you’re setting up in a cramped home office or hotel room and all you need is to scan directly to your laptop, the RR-60 does that and does it well.
