Customer Ratings & Reviews

After years of putting up with all-in-one machines, I switched to this dedicated scanner and it is dramatically better. The quality of scanning is high, the speed is fast, and the user interface is easy. Having it scan automatically into Dropbox is a nice feature. This is an example of getting superior performance from a dedicated machine.

I tried really hard to like this scanner, I really did, but every positive thing it has going for it comes with a major drawback that makes it impossible to recommend and ends up as a massive disappointment at this price point. Scan Speed Excellent *but only for completely consecutive pages*, every time it encounters a blank side (front or back) it hangs for ~5-10 seconds so if you have any pages with a blank side, the 35 ppm quickly drops to <10 ppm. Scan Quality Good for documents, OK for recent color photographs, atrocious for older or slightly faded photographs. Any printed photo with some age showing (and I mean c'mon aren't those the only photos anyone is trying to digitize?) get "corrected" by ScanSmart which in my case meant 30% of all photos end up scanned as giant black or white over/underexposed blobs. Yes, I can go in and manually tweak the settings per photograph to get it to scan correctly for each individual one, but that defeats the entire point of an autofeed scanner like this. Connectivity WiFi hardware quality is poor, but honestly not unexpected for any consumer printer/scanner peripheral. We have an enterprise-grade network with multiple APs at home and the ES-500W is the only device we have that loses connectivity every few minutes. This means the "one-click" scan doesn't work about 30-50% of the time. Software The real tragedy though is how atrocious the desktop software is and how it *ruins regular use of your computer beyond scanning*. I'm a software developer and I'm comfortable calling the Epson Event Manager malware. - It runs in the background even when disabled through official channels causing significant CPU usage when not being used. - It circumvents the macOS notification system to insist on showing notifications for every time the scanner disconnects or connects to WiFi (which is *very often*, see earlier point about how terrible the WiFi hardware is) even when notifications from Epson have been disabled in System Preferences. - It installs a lovely permanent menu bar icon that cannot be disabled without hacking around in the terminal or uninstalling the software suite that provides all the autofeed capabilities touted. - All of this background nonsense is supposedly to enable one click scanning *but that doesn't work anyway because of the terrible WiFi on the unit itself*! As many other reviewers have noted it also doesn't offer basic features I would expect of a business focused document scanner like being able to split a scan into more than one PDF. All in all, the ES-500W is an excellent piece of scanning hardware that's destroyed by the horrendous software that accompanies it. If they raised the price by $50 and hired some half-decent software devs I wouldn't be deeply regretting this purchase right now. If they ship an update to the scanning suite that addresses all of this to not be so awful, I'd gladly bump this up to a 4 (-1 for the wifi issues).

I was in need of a good photo scanner and the Epson FF-680 was just out of my price range so I took a chance on the es-500W, and I'm glad I did. This thing will scan up to 1200 dpi, its super fast and makes clear photo scans. It may not have the auto correction functions the FF-680 does, but after taking about 10 minutes to tweek the scan settings, wha la - awesomeness!

Good scanning work horse! Fast & efficient for every day use. This is our 2nd Epson Work force scanner, the 1st one lasted just over 5 years. Reccomend to stick with the black only units for most cost effectiveness. Unit has a Small desk foot print for space savings. Highly reccomend the Epson Workforce Black Scanners.

This thing is awesome, after we had some family members pass away I ended up with bin after bin after bin of documents, pictures and other misc things. I purchased this to scan docs and pics. This easily does 30 - 50 sheets, double sided in a minutes or so. It is also super small so it folds away easily.

This is a reasonably priced dual-sided scanner. It scans multiple pages very quickly. The only drawback (for me) is you can not put in 40 pages and split up the pages to different files -- you have to feed in just the pages you want to be 'merged' together, no more and no less.

This is a very competitive price, easy and quick set up. Scans multiple pages very quickly, loading and scanning vertically. The information appears on computer straight away. A great feature is if pages are scanned in incorrect order by mistake this can be rectified on computer without the need to rescan everything.

quarantine afforded me the time to scan a bunch of my historical files as readable PDFs and save them for easy searching in the future. Everything was simple to set up and the scanning was fast!

I have had many previous scanners that were part of my printer, but honestly, a stand alone scanner is the way to go. It scans everything, front and back with one swipe and the copy is good quality and really fast. This is my go to piece of office equipment.

I have had other scanners .... but of all including the Fujitsu scanners, this one is without a doubt the best scanner in 2020. The software is very strong and gives the user complete control of what to do and how to setup the scanner the way you want it to work. The scanner itself is very fast. All you need to do is have a good internet connection. You install your scanner to your network, where your other devices are connected to and you are ready to go. I personally have 2 scanners connected to the same network and I can work them off several computers. While the other brand (FUJITSU) you can not connect the scanner to other computers unless you disconnect the scanner from computer to computer. I would definitely recommend this scanner over any other in the market today ( 09-2020)

I am using this scanner for a few weeks. Easy to use, works fast. I did not try all functions yet. Wireless set up with Mac Book was okay but with some hiccups - not sure if it was scanner or Mac problem, I had to do the same steps a few times and finally it worked.

Scanner was easy to set-up and east to operate. Scans color and auto-detects both sides of page at the same time. Included software is functional. So far I am very happy,

I have always used all in one printers for scanning purposes, bought this one bacause I had to scan hundreds of pages and thanks to this scanner I was able to finish super fast, the setup was super easy and with the press of a button your are scanning.

I love this scanner. It's really quick, especially for scanning front and back at the same time. It does get stuck a little easy but I found how to correct it and not lose my place in scanning progress. Downloading the software was easy!

Fast, efficient, and easy to operate wirelessly. Scans 50 pages in under a minute. I highly recommend it for anyone who spends time scanning. It has never jammed in the month and a half since I bot it.

This was a great purchase! It's a fast scanner and has greatly improved the efficiency of my business. Very easy to set up and compact in size when not in use. I highly recommend this scanner!

Set was easy; plug in, set-up with Wifi, push on switch, load pictures and push scan button. Pictures scan quickly! If you have tons of pictures to scan, spend the extra money for this scanner.

This little scanner is terrific. I had one at my work, so I ordered one for home. Very easy to set up, just follow directions on the screen. Good quality scans. Definitely recommend.

The scanner was very easy to set up and get working. It is very fast and efficient in scanning multiple pages through the document feeder. It is much faster and easier to use compared to my old, outdated scanner.

This scanner is quick with decent quality scans. I have only used it on the basic factory settings, so not sure how it is with higher resolution scans like photos. I will try that next.