Doxie GO SE Wifi

Product	Images / Minute	Resolution	Connectivity	Duplex Scanning	ADF Tray	Weight	Price
Doxie GO SE Wifi	7 IPM	600 dpi	Wi-Fi, USB	No	No	1.1 lb. (0.5 kg)	Click for more info

The Doxie GO SE Wifi is what we consider to be the best document scanner for home. It is a portable scanner bear in mind, but it will sit nicely on your desk and can easily work as a desktop scanner. The nice thing with these mobile scanners is that you can move them around the house and everyone in the family can use them.

This one is especially easy to use because it doesn’t even need a computer to scan. It has a rechargeable battery which will last for at least 400 scans per charge and that means you really don’t need any USB cables for it to work. Just plug in the SD card and you are all set. Once you are done scanning, you just remove it and then hand it over to whoever needs it next.

The scan speed is not fantastic, it is just 7 PPM, so you won’t be scanning large amounts of documents with it anytime soon, but the key is more in the flexibility. It can also connect through Wi-fi and Wi-fi Direct so that you can send your scans either to your personal computer or to your iPhone through the companion app. The app also allows you to scan directly to the Cloud to either Icloud, Evernote, Dropbox and OneNote. There is an Android app too, but it has limited functionality.

This handheld home scanner also comes with OCR software and this time it is the ABBYY FineReader OCR engine with which you can convert scanned images to searchable PDF files. The recognition accuracy is great but because it is only the engine, there isn’t a variety of file formats that you normally get like Word Documents with editable text or Excel XLS spreadsheets along with TXT and RTF or ePub.

Fujitsu Scansnap S1300i

Product	Images / Minute	Resolution	Connectivity	Duplex Scanning	ADF Tray	Weight	Price
Fujitsu Scansnap S1300i	24 IPM	600 dpi	USB 2.0, USB 1.1	Yes	Yes	3.08 lb. (1.4 kg)	Click for more info

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i is a document scanner for home that doesn’t have the wireless scanning and SD Card gizmos that the Doxie has, but it is still one of the best home scanners ever made and we’ll explain why it justifies its higher price.

First of all, it has an automatic document feeder ADF tray which can hold up to 10 documents at any given moment and that’s going to boost your productivity because you can just put in the documents and let it do its thing rather than just feeding them one-by-one.

It is also a duplex scanner, so if you have double-sided documents you don’t have to feed them twice through the scanner. The scan speed is up to 24 images per minute.

The great thing about this scanner is its software which can automatically crop documents and adjust them to their real size and also deskew them and detect their correct layout orientation. It works great not just for scanning documents but for photo scanning too.

It also comes with the full ABBYY Optical Character Recognition software for ScanSnap. It is a slightly limited version but you can still convert the scanned documents to either searchable PDF, editable Word files, Excel files and even PPT presentations. The text recognition accuracy is some of the best that we have seen in an OCR software and also the layout detection. The device itself can scan to JPEG but there are no options for TIFF, PNG or BMP Bitmaps.

It has ScanSnap drivers not TWAIN, so you can’t connect it seamlessly with apps like Photoshop or most of the scanning apps out there because it lacks the universal TWAIN interface and it is compatible with both operating systems be it Windows PC or Mac OS.

So this mobile scanner is the perfect device to bring productivity to your home office.

Epson ES-50

Product	Images / Minute	Resolution	Connectivity	Duplex Scanning	ADF Tray	Weight	Price
Epson ES-50	10 IPM	600 dpi	USB 2.0	No	No	0.59 lb. (0.26 kg)	Click for more info

The Epson ES-50 is the cheaper document scanner for home use and its price is more than half of the Fujitsu’s. It doesn’t have the connectivity of the Doxie or the auto document feeder tray of the S1300i but it still performs basic functions very well and user ratings for this scanner are very good. The pixel density is the same as with the other two portable scanners having an optical resolution of 600 DPI from its CIS Contact Image Sensor and an RGB color depth of 16-bit in color and 8-bit for grayscale.

It can scan to the cloud and it is compatible with cloud storage platforms like Google Drive. There is a TWAIN driver which you won’t find on the first two home scanners we presented here so you can scan directly to Photoshop or other scanning apps which support this interface.

It doesn’t have a rechargeable battery and can run USB powered. It won’t even take up any space in your house because it is extremely compact and lightweight, weighing just 0.59 lbs. The OCR software comes in the form of the Nuance OCR engine and it can create editable Word and Excel files along with the usual searchable PDFs.

The scanning speed is not bad either with a 10 pages per minute speed, but bear in mind that it has no duplex function, so you’ll have to feed your double-sided documents twice to scan both sides of the sheet of paper. Speaking of paper, it can take any paper size up to A4 format and longer documents up to 72 inches.

This home scanner comes with a 1-year limited warranty in the US and Canada.

Brother DS-620

Product	Images / Minute	Resolution	Connectivity	Duplex Scanning	ADF Tray	Weight	Price
Brother DS-620	16 IPM	600 dpi	Hi-Speed USB 2.0	No	No	0.88 lb. (0.39 kg)	Click for more info

Even though the Brother DS-620 is marketed as a business scanner, it will still work great in your home. It is light, it has a 7.5 sheets per minute scanning speed and a digital image resolution of 600 dots per inch.

Brother says that you can rund photos, regular plain paper and plastic cards like ID Cards and business cards but not embossed ones.

With the supplied software, you can send the digital scans to e-mail, a compatible printer, local network and even FTP servers.

It can run USB-powered so when you are on-the-go you only need to connect it to your laptop or power bank to power it.

Which is the best home scanner for me?

Overall, our favorite is the Doxie because you can move it from your house or apartment’s living room to the bedroom, share it with family members and not have to connect it to a power source every time because of its rechargeable battery.

If you want something for a more productive home office, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i will have you covered.

If you are on a tight budget, then the Epson ES-50 is the perfect choice.