Epson WorkForce DS-40 Color Portable Scanner

 

Epson WorkForce DS-40 Color Portable Scanner.  Epson About.com Rating   If you’re one of those professionals who travel from place to place, collecting piles of information, much of which would prove invaluable, if, that is, you had an easy way to collect and store it. You could, of course, collect business cards, product white papers, customer information, you name it, and then scan and save it all when you get back, but that could quickly turn into a long and grueling task. Besides, it’s better to save and catalog data while it’s still fresh. Another option is, of course, is to take a scanner with you. Depending on the nature of your business travel (and, of course, the scanner itself), that idea can be anywhere from mildly inconvenient to downright inhibiting, maybe even somewhat ridiculous—unless, that is, you choose a portable scanner designed specifically for you road warriors, such as the subject of this review, Epson’s $179.99 (MSRP) WorkForce DS-40 Color Portable Scanner. At just 1.1 pounds (without batteries) and smaller than a bread box (much smaller), it’s easy to carry around with you, and a slew of features make it suitable for scanning documents on the fly, on your time frame and when it’s convenient. Design & Features The DS-40 is shaped like (but much smaller than) a three-hole punch and it weighs a heck of a lot less than good one. At 11.7 inches wide, by 2.8 inches from front to back, and only 1.7 inches tall, it takes up very little space. And, like I said earlier, it weighs only 1.1 pounds. It runs on either four AA batteries, or via USB (such as, say, your laptop or tablet USB port), meaning that you don’t need access to a power outlet to use the scanner. How the scanner itself works is straightforward; you simply insert the original face down in the scanner, click Scan, and the DS-40 pulls the sheet over the scanner lens, all the while scanning and creating a preview. However, with products like these, as long as the scanner works accurately, the bundled software also needs to be feature-rich and accurate. For example, a major part of scanning documents is relying on the accuracy of the bundled optical character recognition (OCR) software, for converting scanned text to editable text. In this case, the DS-40 comes with Epson Document Capture Pro document management software and Abby FineReader (an excellent OCR program) for capturing and converting text documents. In addition, you can also scan to Google Drive, Evernote, and SharePoint. You can scan directly to editable and searchable PDFs, and it supports TWAIN, a scanning interface for, among other things, connecting to document management software Furthermore, if you scan a lot of images or graphics, the bundled utilities include software for text enhancement, skew correction, color enhancement and color dropout. And, in addition to the image scanning features mentioned above, the TWAIN driver also supports variable color enhance. Oh yeah, and I should mention that it comes with its own little bag for toting the scanner, which comes in handy. Supported Platforms Nowadays, you’re just as likely to be scanning from a smartphone or tablet as you are a PC. Through administering its wide line of consumer and small-business printers, Epson has already established wide support for mobile devices. Making the DS-40 work with the majority of laptops, tablets, and smartphones was most likely easy enough. Currently the DS-40 has drivers for Android, Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, which just about covers the majority of mobile devices available today. Granted, this is by all means a niche product with a select group of would-be users. But if you’ve the discipline to use it consistently, it serves a needed purpose, and well.                                                            source of this article : http://printscan.about.com/od/epsonscanners/fl/Epson-WorkForce-DS-40-Color-Portable-Scanner.htm