Xerox D35 Scanner review: A great choice for heavy workloads

Aimed at home workers and small businesses with a paper mountain to tackle, the Xerox D35 Scanner offers great scanning performance for a small price. For only £210, you get a top speed of 45ppm for colour and mono scans at 200dpi, with speeds only dropping to 35ppm for colour scans at 300dpi.

The D35 is ready for some serious scan action thanks to a high daily duty cycle of 8,000 pages and a capacious 50-page ADF. Its relatively flat paper path helps when scanning heavier media such as photos, and the paper tray guides can be flipped down for scanning documents up to three metres in length.

Installation on a Windows 10 PC took ten minutes, with the routine loading the latest drivers and complete software bundle. Along with the Visioneer OneTouch scan-management app and integral Acuity image-enhancement tools, you get ABBYY’s FineReader OCR software, Capture SE for batch scan management, DriverPlus for scan customisation and the Organiser AI app for slick document management.

Visioneer OneTouch sits quietly in the background and links the scanner’s function button to nine different actions for walk-up scanning. Actions include scans to detected applications on the host, local and network folders, printers, email, fax, FTP and SharePoint servers, while output formats include BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PDF and searchable PDF.

The OneTouch Acuity feature provides anti-skew, auto-crop, de-speckling, page rotation and blank page skipping capabilities. Its redaction feature can obscure areas of a scan with coloured blocks, and for more image-manipulation tools you can call up the TWAIN DriverPlus interface.

To start a scan, you click a OneTouch profile from the system tray or walk up to the scanner, choose an action number and select simplex or duplex operations. In all cases, there is a five-second pause as the app acquires the scanner and then starts the scanning process.

Performance was near perfect, with duplex scans of 30 bank statements returning 44ppm for 200dpi greyscale and colour settings. Stepping up to 300dpi saw greyscale scan speed hold steady and colour drop to 35ppm, but the D35 surprised us with its 600dpi scans, as it achieved an impressive 43ppm for greyscale and 33ppm for colour.

You won’t need the higher resolutions, however, as output quality at 200dpi is perfectly adequate for sPDFs and document archiving. The D35 is very quiet during scanning, and it handled all our documents, receipts and waybills without a single paper jam.

The Organiser AI app will prove useful as it scans the host PC, detects all document types and provides extensive search facilities. It also integrates directly with Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive so you can send files to the cloud simply by dragging them to the icons at the bottom of its interface.

The D35 may be a USB-only scanner, but it has a trick up its sleeve as it can link up with Visioneer’s VAST Network service. Install the Visioneer Network Scan Service Manager app on the host PC and you can share the D35 over the LAN.

Once each client PC has the D35 TWAIN driver, Network Scanner Manager app and network driver installed, it can connect to the scanner and use it as though it were local. We tested this on a networked Windows 10 PC and, after connecting to the scanner, could acquire images from any TWAIN-compliant app and use OneTouch as well.

The Xerox D35 Scanner delivers a lot of features for a very modest outlay, and combines them with good speed and output quality. It’s a great choice for heavy scan workloads, and the network support makes it even more versatile.

Xerox D35 Scanner specifications