Epson WorkForce DS-510 review

This desktop document scanner has a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), and is designed to make short work of archiving stacks of paper in a small office. It has two image sensors, so it can scan both sides of an original document in a single pass or use image stitching to capture a folded A3 original.

This scanner’s lid opens to form a strong input tray with adjustable paper guides, while the output tray feels similarly chunky. The DS-510’s top panel contains a sliding switch to select normal or folded originals, and a large latch lets you open up the body for maintenance and jam removal. There are three buttons to toggle power, start a job and cancel a job. Epson supplies TWAIN and ISIS drivers along with Document Capture Pro, Epson’s proprietary document processing software.

When using the TWAIN interface, the DS-510 is much like a regular scanner, and it’s blisteringly fast, with a 150dpi A4 scan needing just seven seconds to complete. If you’re doing multiple scans, it’s better to use Document Capture Pro, which lets you scan, process and display documents and make small tweaks such as removing or rotating pages. Once happy, you can save to file formats including a TIFF image and a searchable PDF. The results can be stored locally or uploaded to online services such as Google Drive, SugarSync and Evernote.

Scans can be triggered from software or via the scanner’s Start button. With the latter method we encountered delays of about 10 seconds before the first sheet of paper was fed, but after that things progressed rapidly. At 150 dots per inch (dpi), we scanned all 24 colour pages of our mixed graphics test in 64 seconds, for an overall speed of 22.5 images per minute (ipm). Paper was fed just as quickly at 300dpi, but the mechanism slows at 600dpi, at which 10 postcard images took 59 seconds. Image quality was uniformly very good.

Document Capture Pro is perfect for archiving

We presented the DS-510 with our nasty 10-page, 16-side document test, comprised of old and clumsily removed magazine pages, randomly interspersed with regular single-sided A4 paper, with some pages deliberately upside down. It coped admirably, with no physical hesitations or misfeeds, and with no evidence of images bleeding through the thin magazine pages, which were straightened by the de-skew function. We had to lower the blank page skip sensitivity to get it to work perfectly, though, and the auto-rotate was caught out by a couple of graphics-rich pages without much text for reference, but such snags are common and easily corrected before the result is saved. It took 58 seconds to produce a searchable, 16-page PDF from the chaos.

This is a competent and user-friendly scanner, but it’s narrowly outpaced by the Canon ImageFormula DR-C130, which costs about the same and comes with slightly better software. The Canon is the better choice, but the DS-510 runs it very close.