Epson WorkForce DS-790WN review: Scanning that covers every angle

Epson’s WorkForce DS-790WN is ideal for businesses that don’t want to dedicate a host system to their scanning operations, as along with a standard USB 3 port, this desktop model has integral Gigabit LAN and 802.11n wireless services. Its fast 45ppm scan speed for colour and mono documents means it can digitise your documents in double quick time and, at £499, it’s priced right for those on tight budgets.

The scanner is built to handle high demand, with a quoted 7,000-sheet daily duty cycle and a capacious 100-page ADF. It looks up to the job, too: its sturdy input paper guides kept our large bank statement bundles firmly in place during scanning, and its long paper mode can scan fan-fold documents and banners up to six metres in length.

The large 10.9cm colour touchscreen is perfect for walk-up scanning with icons for sending documents directly to computers, network folders, FTP servers, email, a local USB stick, cloud storage providers and Windows PCs using WSD (web services for devices). Computers are displayed in the touchscreen once they have Epson’s software installed, while the other network destinations are enabled from the scanner’s web console.

For direct to email scans, we set up our SMTP mail server and added email contacts (up to 300 are supported), after which they appeared in the touchscreen for quick access. Cloud scanning is configured from Epson’s Connect portal and, after registering the scanner, we could create destinations for Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and EverNote.

Networked over Gigabit Ethernet, installation on our Windows 10 PCs was quick. A single utility handles device discovery, driver downloads, installing Epson’s Scan 2 and Document Capture Pro utilities and checking for firmware updates.

The Scan 2 utility provides plenty of scan controls and is loaded when acquiring scans from third-party products using the TWAIN driver. You can select a resolution, colour, greyscale or mono scans, document and contents skew correction, simplex or duplex operations and blank page skipping.

Advanced settings offer text enhancement, brightness and contrast controls, and punch hole removal, plus watermark addition and an option to send images to two destinations simultaneously. Along with local and network folder destinations, you can select BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and sPDF output formats, and save the settings as quick access profiles.

Epson’s Document Capture Pro provides excellent scan-management tools. You can create a range of jobs that comprise scan settings, output formats and destinations, job separation using options such as barcodes, patch codes or OCR detection areas, and save them for one-click access. Each PC appears in the scanner’s touchscreen so scans can be sent directly to them, and assigning button numbers to selected jobs on each PC makes them available for selection as well.

Performance is superb, with our stack of 30 bank statements swiftly dispatched at the quoted 45ppm for greyscale and colour scans at both 200dpi and 300dpi resolutions. Increasing the resolution to 600dpi also returned respectable speeds of 12.4ppm.

You won’t need a higher resolution for document archiving, however, as output quality at 200dpi is fine for these tasks, with Epson’s OCR services correctly converting every word on our statements down to 6pt fonts. The scanner was very quiet when scanning our test documents and its paper handling was near perfect, with only the occasional courier waybill causing the ultrasonic jam detection to be activated.

The WorkForce DS-790WN has every scanning angle covered, making it a great choice for business that want standalone digitising services. Its touchscreen makes walk-up scanning a breeze, Epson provides lots of scan-management tools and it delivers great speed and quality.

Epson WorkForce DS-790WN specifications