Epson DS-30000 Large-format Document Scanner – Review 2020

Epson’s DS-30000 Large-Format Document Scanner ($2,499) is a high-volume desktop document scanner designed for use in large offices and workgroups. Like the Xerox DocuMate 6710 reviewed here in January 2019, the DS-30000 scans up to tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) documents, compared to the average document scanner’s letter- and legal-size limitations. A huge difference between the DS-30000 and the DocuMate is that the latter is a large, ultra-high-volume machine that looks more like a laser printer than a scanner. It lists for close to three times more than the DS-30000, which, as a desktop document scanner, has extendable trays front and back that fold up out of the way when not in use. The first wide-format desktop document scanner I know of, the Epson is fast and accurate, and in a few ways much more versatile than the DocuMate 6710, not to mention much more affordable. That’s more than enough to earn our Editors’ Choice nod for high-volume, large-format desktop document scanners.

In addition to the DS-30000, Epson also offers the DS-32000, which delivers about 25 percent higher scanning speeds and volume ratings for an additional $1,000. The DS-30000 measures 8.6 by 14.6 by 8.2 inches (HWD) with its trays closed and weighs 12.8 pounds, which is about the same size as its beefier sibling and close to 3 pounds lighter. In contrast, Xerox’s abovementioned DocuMate 6710 and Kodak’s i3500, another huge tabloid-size beast, are several inches bigger in all directions and weigh over 20 pounds more than the DS-30000. 

The Epson is closer in size and girth to a standard-size desktop document scanner, such as Visioneer’s Patriot H80 or Alaris’ S2080w. Neither of these supports tabloid-size documents, though the Alaris machine offers an optional A3 flatbed attachment for about $500. The attachment, of course, supports only one sheet at a time, which is not as handy as the DS-30000’s 120-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) capable of holding up to 60 A3 sheets at a time. But then, the S2080w and its attachment together cost several hundred dollars less than the Epson and thousands of dollars less than other tabloid-size machines.

The DS-30000 comes with Epson Scan 2 and Epson Document Capture Pro, which we’ll discuss in a moment. You can also set up and execute scans from a 2.7-inch programmable touch screen, shown below. From here, you can configure your own scanning profile telling the scanner what resolution to use, whether the document is one- or two-sided, what file format to save to, where to save or send the file, and so on, or you can choose a preconfigured workflow profile corresponding with software on the machine to which the scanner is tethered.

Like most of Epson’s higher-end desktop document scanners, this one comes ready to support only USB (in this case, USB 3.0) connectivity, meaning that it connects to a single PC. Epson offers a $350 Network Interface Utility that adds Ethernet connectivity to most of its desktop scanners, but it doesn’t work with the DS-30000. Smartphones and tablets can’t access the scanner, either. 

The ADF mentioned earlier holds up to 120 letter-size sheets, 60 A3-size sheets, 40 postcards, 30 business cards, one to five plastic cards depending on thickness, one long document up to 220 inches, 10 envelopes, 10 carrier sheets, or one passport with an optional passport carrier sheet. You can load letter-size originals in either portrait or landscape orientation, an option not available on standard-size scanners. Supported resolutions range from 50 dots per inch (dpi) to 1,200dpi.

The DS-30000’s daily duty cycle is 30,000 scans, versus 35,000 for the DocuMate 6710, 25,000 for the Kodak i3500, 10,000 for the Patriot H80, and 8,000 for the Alaris S2080w. Like most of Epson’s recent document scanners, the DS-30000 comes with a three-year warranty that includes next-business-day replacement, indicating that the company has confidence in its products’ durability.

Top-Drawer Software

A typical software bundle with Epson Workgroup DS series scanners (as opposed to the WorkForce ES series models) includes Epson Scan 2, a scanner interface utility, and Epson Document Capture Pro, an interface utility that is also a fairly robust document-management and -archiving program. Both programs are state-of-the-art and quite capable. The DS-30000 comes with an upgraded 3.0 version of Document Capture Pro, which we’ll get to in a moment. Let’s check out Epson Scan 2 first. 

What you and your sysadmin will like about Epson Scan 2 is that it can provide each of your users with a mode or interface suited to his or her scanning experience. The modes are Home, Office, and Professional, each containing a set of commands more complex than the last to provide each user with comfortable choices and less guesswork. As you can see in the image below, Home Mode offers relatively few options versus Professional Mode, with Office Mode landing in between with enough settings to tweak scans as the user sees fit.

Epson Document Capture Pro 3.0 is an adept and proficient document-management program designed to help you create, configure, and maintain your own document-management-system front end and back end. It processes and saves your scans to one or several workflow destinations or file types. These include image or searchable PDFs, Microsoft Word or Excel, email, FTP, a printer, or various scan, convert, and save-to-file-management destinations. You can also scan to Google Drive, SugarSync, WebDAV, Microsoft SharePoint, and other cloud and file-archiving sites.

You can create workflow profiles in Capture Pro that correspond with job numbers on the DS-30000’s control panel. In other words, you make all your configuration settings, from resolution to final destinations, and then save the profile. Then it will show up in the list of profiles on the face of your scanner; select it and go. The DS-30000 comes with several preconfigured profiles that you can use as is, or modify as you like.

The software bundle also includes TWAIN and ISIS drivers for compatibility with existing applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft PowerPoint, and a host of others that support scanning directly into them.

Testing the DS-30000: Workhorse Speeds 

Epson rates the DS-30000 at 70 one-sided (simplex) letter-size pages per minute (ppm) and 140 two-sided or duplex images per minute (ipm), where each page side is an image. I should point out that the company does not rate this scanner’s tabloid or wide-format speeds, nor do we have a set of wide-format benchmark routines for assessing them. I tested the DS-30000 using Document Capture Pro over USB 3.0 from our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10 Pro.

Without the lag time, or the time it takes for the PC to convert and save the scanned text to a usable file format (which for our purposes is either image or searchable PDF), the DS-30000 scanned our one-sided 25-page text document at a rate of 74.3ppm and our two-sided 25-page (50-side) document at 145.2ipm. Those numbers are a bit above Epson’s official ratings for both tests.

At this juncture, though, the imaged text isn’t usable—not until it is saved in a format supported by a word-processing, document-archiving, or page-layout program. So in addition to timing how fast the scanner digitizes hardcopy pages, I also clock how long it takes for the software, in this case Document Capture Pro, to convert and save the text to image PDF. 

The DS-30000 scanned, converted, and saved the same 25-page stack of one-sided pages to image PDF at a rate of 71.9ppm. The two-sided stack took 142.4ipm, still slightly over Epson’s ratings. By comparison, the Xerox DocuMate 6710 managed 71.4ppm and 142.9ipm, while Kodak’s i3500 ripped through my test documents at impressive rates of 115ppm and 214ipm. The Visioneer Patriot H80 pulled off 81.1ppm and 162.2ipm, and the Alaris S2080i showed an equally notable 84.5ppm and 167.6ipm.

Next, I timed how long it took to scan, convert, and save to the more versatile and complex searchable PDF format. This time, the DS-30000 turned 50 hardcopy page sides into editable text files in an average time of 27 seconds, or just over half a second per page. The DocuMate beat that by 4 seconds, while the Kodak fell behind the Epson here by 43 seconds. (To be fair, though, we tested that scanner some two-and-a-half years ago, and it’s a safe bet that both the firmware and software have been updated since then.)

At 28 seconds, the letter-size Visioneer H80 all but tied the DS-30000, and the Alaris came in at 44 seconds, which isn’t bad. In any case, this wide-format Epson desktop document scanner easily held its own against some mighty powerful enterprise-level monsters.

Proper Text: Impressive Accuracy, Too

Optical character recognition (OCR), the process of converting scanned text to editable text, has literally come of age over the past five to 10 years. There was a time not that long ago when getting clean-enough conversions to avoid time-consuming corrections was a hit-or-miss, frustrating proposition. Nowadays, though, OCR technology has seen huge strides forward in both imaging and processing routines, to the extent that most errors (even when scanning light, ill-delineated text pages) are with small text below 8 points—and even there, most often with text of 5 and 6 points, font sizes rarely used in most of today’s documents.

By today’s standards, then, the DS-30000’s OCR accuracy, while impressive and not requiring a lot of follow-up editing, is about average—down to 5 points error-free on our Arial font test page and 6 points without mistakes on our Times New Roman sample. The DocuMate, for example, tied these scores, and the S2080w got down to 6 points without mistakes on both font samples, as did the Patriot H80. The big, beefy Kodak i3500 kicked up a somewhat below-average score here, but again, it has most likely seen a few updates since our review of it appeared.

How to Get Large-Format Scans for Less

Typically, to get a scanner capable of handling wide-format or tabloid-size pages meant springing for an ultra-high-volume enterprise machine of at least a few thousand dollars. Granted, the DS-30000 lists for $2,499, but that’s still less than half of what the huge 300-sheet-capacity machines go for. The Epson’s 120-sheet ADF will require more attention, to be sure, but then when it’s not in use, you can fold up its trays and easily move it out of the way.

Overall, I found little to dislike about this machine, though a price reduction would make it an even better value. Even so, it’s by far the least costly large-format scanner I know, and that, combined with its stellar performance and accuracy, are more than enough to push it into the spotlight as our favorite high-volume large-format desktop document scanner.

Epson DS-30000 Large-Format Document Scanner Specs

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