Yet another addition to Epson’s sizable assortment of sheetfed scanners is the $449 DS-575W II Wireless Color Duplex Document Scanner. Like most of today’s document scanners, the DS-575W II offers highly accurate optical character recognition (OCR) for converting scanned pages to editable (or searchable) text. Even so, while the Epson is a more than capable device, it competes with a huge field of highly adept and feature-rich machines—including two of our Editors’ Choice award recipients, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 and Brother ADS-2700W. That’s not to say the DS-575W II won’t serve you well in low-volume to midrange applications, but its price seems a bit high.
Fitting In
Closed and out of service, the DS-575W II measures 6.9 by 11.6 by 6.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 8.1 pounds. That’s identical in size and heft to several Epson DS-500 series scanners, including the WorkForce DS-575W and the DS-530 II. When you open the input and output trays, the sheetfed document scanner extends to two or three times its closed size, as do most others including Canon’s ImageFormula DR-C225 II, Brother’s ADS-2700W Wireless High-Speed Desktop Document Scanner, and Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1600.
Most of the DS-500 series scanners feature somewhat sparse controls, as seen below.
From top to bottom, the buttons are Power, Wi-Fi Connect, Wi-Fi, Double-Feed Detection, Slow Mode, Stop, and Start. There are also five status LEDs including Error, Automatic Feeding Mode, Ready, Double-Feed Detection Skip, and Slow Mode, as well as additional status indicators comprised of blue symbols—AP mode, Wi-Fi, Error, Automatic Feeding Mode, Ready, Double-Feed Detection mode—that display on a black background just above the output slot.
While the onboard controls are convenient for configuring and executing pre-configured workflow profiles, most of the heavy lifting is handled by the bundled software, in this case the Epson Smart Panel app and Epson Document Capture. We’ll examine both in more detail in the next section.
Rated at 50 sheets, I’d say the DS-575W II’s automatic document feeder (ADF) is as small as they come, but the Canon’s ADF holds only 45 pages. Meanwhile, the Epson’s daily duty cycle is 4,000 scans, the same as most of the company’s scanners this size. The Fujitsu iX1600 is rated for 6,000 scans per day and the Brother ADS-2700W for 3,000, while the Canon DR-C225 II trails again with a meager 1,500 scans daily.
While 4,000 scans per day may seem like a lot, Epson backs this and several other desktop scanners with a three-year warranty with advance return and next-day replacement.
Myriad Connectivity and Productivity Options
The usual third-party TWAIN and ISIS scanner drivers allow you to connect the scanner to applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat and the Microsoft Office programs. Standard interfaces include connecting to a single computer via USB 3.2 or to a network via 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. You can easily scan to online storage accounts including Evernote, SharePoint, Google Drive, OneDrive, and more. Additional handheld support comes from Epson’s Smart Panel app, which the company says “transforms your iOS or Android mobile device into an intuitive control center for select Epson printers and scanners.”
That sounds like a tall order, but as scanner interfaces go, Smart Panel is intuitive and slick-looking, with easy-to-navigate screens that make it simple to set up and use. You also get Epson’s Document Capture, a pared-down version of the company’s capable Document Capture Pro document management software. Document Capture lets you manage and archive your scans and other documents as Microsoft Word files or image or searchable PDFs.
You can save files with sequential and other naming schemes, keywords, and other features that make documents easy to track and find. The DS-575W II comes ready to help you create and maintain an entry-level document management system.
Moderate Speeds, Terrific Accuracy
Epson rates the DS-575W II at 35 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 70 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm), where each page side is counted as an image. I tested it over a USB 3.2 connection to our Intel Core i5 testbed running Windows 10 Pro. During my first test, I clocked the DS-575W II as it scanned our one-sided 25-page text document, and the accompanying software converted and saved the file as an image PDF at an average rate of 36.6ppm. Next, I scanned our two-sided, 25-page (50 images) text document. Here, the Epson managed 71.4ipm. These scores are pretty good.
With the same speed ratings as the DS-575W II, the Brother ADS-2700W trounced it by 8.2ppm in simplex scanning but was less than 2ipm quicker for duplex. The ScanSnap iX1600 (rated at 40ppm and 80ipm) handily outpaced the Epson in both simplex and duplex scan jobs, while Canon’s DR-C225 II (rated at 25ppm and 50ipm) brought up the rear.
Our next test gauges how quickly the scanner and its software can capture and save the same 50-sided document to the much more versatile searchable PDF file format. The DS-575W II scanned, converted, and saved the file in 42 seconds, which is one of the fastest times for this group. The Canon, for example, took a sluggish 58 seconds.
At least as important as speed is accuracy. Correcting conversion errors can be time-consuming and frustrating. Nowadays, though—whether you’re using a $100 portable or a $1,000 high-volume workhorse scanner—OCR accuracy is almost a non-issue. The DS-575W II scanned our Arial test font page down to 5 points and our Times New Roman page without mistakes down to 6 points. These aren’t the finest scores we’ve seen; not long ago, Epson’s WorkForce ES-580W scored a perfect 4 points error-free on both test pages. Even so, the DS-575W II’s 5 and 6 points are more adequate for most business scanning environments. In other words, you’re not likely to encounter many if any documents with 6-point text.
Capable, Accurate, and Costly
My only real concern with this medium-volume desktop document scanner is its price tag. Two of our Editors’ Choice winners, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 and the Brother ADS-2700W, offer stronger feature sets for about the same price or a little less. On the other hand, what you do get from Epson that most other manufacturers haven’t matched is a three-year warranty with advance exchange and next-day shipping. If nothing else, the company has confidence in its scanners and backs them up, which might tip your buying decision toward the DS-575W II.
