Epson ES-300W mobile scanner | An honest review.

What’s so special about it?

The Epson ES-300W has some of the fastest scanning speeds in it’s class. It can do 50 images per minute (25 sheets). It can scan through wi-fi directly to your smartphone, tablet or PC. It also has built-in image processing technology that offers color and image adjustments. It also has 20-page auto document feeder tray. That should be fine for office documents such as contracts, invoices, etc. It comes with OCR included from Nuance and ABBYY and the Epson ScanSmart software. I personally recommend the ABBYY OCR engine as it’s one of the best on the market, if not surely the best you can buy.

Epson ES-300W Datasheet Explained

This scanner can handle fast scanning speeds of up to 50 images per minute (25 PPM in simplex mode). At this price, it’s not something outstanding as most devices will offer the same speed. 1 image represents one side of a sheet of paper.

It’s capable of scanning A4 documents, which again, is on par with it’s competitors and offers 600dpi optical resolution. 600 is a lot, it’s more than you will ever need. You can do normal office work with 200 or 300dpi without any problems. At 600dpi the OCR works fantastic.

I like the fact that it comes with SuperSpeed 3.0 USB cable connection and High-bandwith Wi-fi. It can run on battery or usb power. Epson also supplies a separate AC adapter. Wireless connectivity is a must-have these days and this device does wireless scanning perfectly. It also has TWAIN drivers so you can integrate it with more specialized scanning apps.

This scanner uses a CIS sensor. Most portable scanners use a CIS sensor. Larger office scanners tend to use CCD sensors.

As far as the media handling of the scanner goes, it’s quite decent. It can take paper from 50 gsm (Receipts on thin paper) to 230gsm (Invitations, cards, thicker pieces of paper, plastic cards).

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Features for Productivity

Really important, this scanner can scan duplex. That means you only have to pass the sheet of paper once through the scanner and it will scan both sides. But this is not something new as most scanners for this price have this feature.

It also comes with epson image processing technology like automatic color detection. This means that it will detect and decide if your document is in color or black & white. Why does this matter? For black & white files, it will reduce the file size a lot and so the files will load faster in Adobe Acrobat or any software that you are using.

It also has an automatic image rotation feature. What it does is it looks at the image and can tell if you put it upside down and automatically adjusts it.

Automatic image cropping is also a function you’ll find on the Epson ES-300W. What it does is it can tell how big the image is and crop it automatically so that you don’t have black parts on the edges. Again, this is not something special as most scanners for this price are equipped with this feature.

Epson also put its intelligent color and image enhancements. The device also has a background removal feature. This “cleans” the background of the scanned image, making it whiter and so the content in the image stands out much better. This is a feature that you will only find on half of the scanners for this price, so definitely an advantage.

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Quality of images

The Epson ES-300W also comes with automatic deskew. Most scanners in it’s price range don’t have this. This function straightens the image perfectly, even if it’s just 1 degree, it can correct it.

This wireless compact scanner can also remove punch holes from documents. This is not something crucial, but it’s nice to have a cleaner document overall.

The device also comes equipped with optical character recognition OCR technology. Now this is a must, because it’s one of the most important features. It can export your scanned document into searchable pdfs and editable word and excel files. It reads the text from the scanned image. OCR is extremely important to have on a scanner these days. I wouldn’t even buy one without it. .

Epson ES-300W accesories unboxing

The Epson ES-300W comes with a document feeder ADF tray for batch scanning. It’s the little tray where you put in stacks of documents, so that you don’t have to scan them one-by-one manually. Most of the scanners will offer an ADF tray for this price.

This compact duplex document scanner is also quite small and light (at just 2.9 lbs). It comes with a lot of software included like Epson Scan, NewSoft Presto! BizCard, Epson Document Capture Pro, ABBYY FineReader OCR (Amazing software by the way), Epson Document Capture. I don’t how many of these you are going to actually use in real life, but it’s good to have them nonetheless. The scanning software can automatically sync your scanned images to your favorite cloud storage accounts and that can be google drive, evernote or other providers. All the software included is compatible with pc and mac devices. You can also scan to your scan to your smartphone, tablet or computer. The power consumption on this device is up to 10W.

Epson manufactures several scanners in this line, the epson workforce es-200, epson workforce es-300w wireless portable duplex document scanner and the epson workforce es-400 which is a desktop document scanner with ADF and a high duty cycle of 4000 sheets per day. They have different speeds and performance in the 200-400$ price range. One of this scanner’s main competitors is the canon imageformula p-215ii. .

Epson ES-300W driver, manual & brochure

You can download the driver for the Epson ES-300 here.

You can also find the user manual here. That will usually help you get the most of your scanner.

Here is the link to the official brochure as well. It has a bit more detailed info on the specs and functions of the scanner. .

What do real users say?

People who bought the scanner seem to be delighted with the speed (at 300dpi, because when they ran it at higher resolutions, like 600dpi, the scanner worked slower), the OCR quality and the fact that the ADF tray mechanism runs smoothly and so you rarely get paper jams. The thing most people complained about with the Epson ES-300W is the software. They claim that it’s difficult to use and it’s unpolished. The ABBYY OCR module also doesn’t work when you put the scanner in wireless mode. Users have found the device to be easy to install, both on a PC and a MAC. They are also happy about the weight, describing it as “easy to carry around”. <!–

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