Customer Ratings & Reviews

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 purchased this $300+ scanner to help me clear some of the clutter in my office. I had a scanner on my $60 Canon printer/scanner/Fax machine - its quality was acceptable, but having to scan each side separately was very time-consuming. So I reckoned that the additional cost of the Epson scanner would be justified by the cost savings. WRONG. The scan quality is mediocre at best - nowhere near the quality of my $60 Canon. And the software is even worse. It completely has a mind of its own about when it feels like scanning. And when it does finally scan, it puts all the documents into a single PDF, even if you click on Finish after each document. It supposedly scans both sides in a single pass - sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It is completely unreliable. I intend to box it up and bring it back to Best Buy. One of the worst $300 I have ever spent.

I bought this scanner to connect with my work laptop. Strictly purchased for work reasons. When I try to scan and I want to attach to an email I get a constant hanging that says analyzing. This goes on for 20 minutes before it lets me attach to an email. 4 calls in total with one call with customer service that was 3 hours long that I conferenced in my companies IT rep. My companies IT rep says software conflict with epson software and windows 10. Also first level of customer service is not knowledgeable at all asked me what USB cord I was using and I said the one that came with it and you have ink? I said it's a scanner!! They also need to change the constant loop with shaquille o'neal yelling for Henry to pick up this call...after an hour being on hold that is ANNOYING! Returning ASAP!!!

Almost everything in my house is wireless that can be and we can't get this to connect. After 4 hours of working with the wife support and epson support we were told we need to get a USB hub and connect it that way and then (fingers crossed) we can connect wirelessly. Why is this one device different from everything else? Only buy if want to also buy a USB hub.

terrible for photos. called Epson after more than an hour trying to figure out the problem on the phone they couldn't without accessing my computer remotely still they were unable to resolved the issues. They believe my machine is defective.

I was very much looking forward to using this Epson scanner to replace an old Neat unit I have. After installing it, it would not scan. Spent about 45 minutes with Epson customer service who could not get it to work either. Returned it to the store

I downloaded the drivers and utilities from Epson website and scanner would not connect to my laptop. Did all the troubleshooting. So frustrating, I just returned it.

This scanner will not work with a 5.0 ghz Wifi. Really - 5 ghz is not very new. There is nothing in the product reviews or on the box that states it is not compatible.

I bought the scanner for my job, the scan send the papers to dark and it doesn't give you the option to change the settings.

Terrible. Pay attention to the reviews that say won’t connect because it won’t.

The worst product. Does not feed. Defeats the whole purpose of a scanner. Cheaply made.

did not like this item, returned it could not get it set up easly at all

I would never buy another Epsom . Terrible terrible

Very weak and frustrating software. Instead of one program that does several things, it installs several programs that do one thing.. Directions/instructions are very minimal.

- instructions on website dont result in any connection