Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First things first: This is not a portable "wand" scanner, i.e. a scanner you can wave/roll over things like books or whatever, and store images for use later. Instead, this is a slot loaded document scanner. It scans documents through a thin slot. The documents have to be flat, but can be somewhat rigid. The maximum width is 8.5", and the maximum supported length is 14". Basically, this scanner can scan standard and legal sized pieces of paper, and paper sheets smaller than that. It CANNOT scan books or any other document that won't fit in that slot. There are portable scanners that can do that, and they look something like this. So it's good to get that out of the way. In addition, this scanner is NOT self powered, and it does NOT have onboard memory. You MUST plug this scanner into a PC/laptop (Windows and Mac both supported with the included install CDs). So this is hardly a solution you'll stick in your back pocket or your purse. OK, so much for the limitations. How is this at what it does? The answer: Very good. In my tests, I tried single sheets of 8.5x11 paper, 2 sheets at once (double thickness), sheets that were somewhat crumpled, a business card, a birthday card, and a thin round drink coaster. The scanner handled all of them without problem (though the drink coaster had to be supported until it started to go through the scanner). All documents came out the way they went in, with no mis-handling, and no added wrinkles in the documents due to the scanner. I found the text scanning quality to be excellent and completely sufficient for standard optical character recognition using the included Abbyy Finereader 9.0 Sprint software (for Windows). The resolution of the scanned document can be varied up to 600dpi, which is more than sufficient for both OCR and for scanning full color images for repurposing. The image can be scanned to .jpg, .tiff, .bmp, or .pdf. In terms of color documents: The quality was very good, and I was surprised at the lack of moire effects in the output images. I found the colors to be good, vibrant, and quite deep, but sometimes slightly off, especially in the region of purples and blues. Skintones were close to dead on. By default, the software suit installs so that images are scanned at a lower resolution to a .pdf file by default. But these defaults are easily changable through an options panel. Scanning time was not bad, taking about 45 seconds to do a full color 600dpi scan of an 8.5x11 document. The software suite that is included is sufficient: A couple of Epson scanning programs (including one that auto activates when you press the scan button on the physical scanner), a limited version of the excellent (in its full form) Abbyy Finereader (9.0 Spirit) OCR program, and a business card reader (NewSoft Presto! BizCard). (Abbyy is replaced by NewSoft Page Manager if you are installing on a Mac). The Abbyy program should be more than sufficient for OCR of standard text documents. It is probably too limited if your intent is to take complex layout originals and reproduce the entirety of layout in your captured document. But for capturing blocks of text or numbers, it's more than adequate. The user's guide is online--not terrible, but annoying. There are hooks in the scan capture program that allow you to direct your scans to cloud locations like Google Documents and Evernote, as well as to standard destinations on your local hard drive. Overall, this is a nice tool, although the slot loaded nature of it limits who this will be useful for. The scan quality is good, and it's reasonably fast. This will not replace the value of a good flat bed scanner, and I found that while the color images it scanned were surprisingly good and deep looking, the colors did tend to be somewhat off in the purple/blue end of the spectrum. If you're a road warrior who needs to scan documents, I can't imagine you'll do better than this. If you're looking for something for the office, on the other hand, and can afford the bigger footprint of a flat bed scanner, one of Epson's flat bed scanners in the similar price range offers more flexibility and quality that's at least as good. The package includes the scanner, a usb cable, software install CDs, a calibration card, a couple of cleaning sheets, and an inexpensive bag/case for the scanner.