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Epson Workforce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner Review

4.0
Excellent
By William Harrel
April 27, 2017

The Bottom Line

The Epson ES-200 is fast and accurate for a portable document scanner, and it includes helpful document management and business card archiving software. But for $50 more, you can get a model with Wi-Fi and a battery.

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Pros

  • Comes with complete software bundle.
  • Quick scanning and saving to PDF.
  • Powered over USB or AC.
  • Accurate OCR.
  • 20-page ADF.

Cons

  • No battery.
  • Lacks integrated Wi-Fi.

A non-Wi-Fi sibling to the Editors' Choice Epson ES-300W ($219.00 at Amazon) we reviewed recently, the Epson WorkForce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner ($199) is a highly capable portable document scanner. Like the ES-300W, it comes with a top-tier collection of optical character recognition (OCR) and document and business card management programs. And, like the Editors' Choice Canon imageFormula P-215II Scan-tini Personal Document Scanner, both Epson models have automatic document feeders (ADFs) and the ability to scan two-sided multipage documents in a single pass. The ES-200 doesn't support wireless scanning, nor does it have an internal battery (as does the ES-300W) for higher portability. It's a less-expensive alternative to the wireless model for relatively high-speed scanning on the road, but at just $50 more, for many users, the higher-end ES-300W is a better value.

Design and Features

Aside from a few buttons, status LEDs, and the name on the front, the ES-200 looks a lot like the ES-300W. Measuring 2.0 by 11.3 by 3.5 inches (HWD) with the input tray closed, and weighing 2.4 pounds, the ES-200 is about a half inch shorter and half a pound lighter (due primarily to its lack of built-in battery) than the ES-300W's 2.6 by 11.3 by 3.5 inches and 2.9 pounds. But the ES-200 is a little bigger and heavier than the Canon P-215II's 1.6 by 11.2 by 3.7 inches and 2.2 pounds. If any of these three are too big and heavy for you, there's also the Editors' Choice Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 ($83.57 at Amazon) (1.5 by 11.4 by 2.2 and just under a pound), but with it you give up not only the built-in battery in the ES-300W, but also the 20-sheet ADF that comes on both of the Epson and the Canon models. Also, available for those who require completely autonomous scanning sans a PC, is the IRIScan Anywhere 5 Wi-Fi, which allows you to scan to a microSD card housed inside the scanner itself.

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Epson Workforce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document ScannerEpson Workforce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner

You can operate the ES-200 from within the bundled software (see Setup and Software section) or from the scanner's control panel, which consists of three buttons—Power, Stop (Cancel), and Start—and three status LEDs: Error, Automatic Feeding Mode, and Ready. Also on the face of the scanner, in front of the ADF, you'll find a Mode Selector toggle for shifting between automatic document feeding and plastic card scanning. You scan plastic cards by inserting them in to a designated section on the front edge of the machine, where documents typically scroll out after they've been scanned. Both the ES-200 and the ES-300W draw the card in through the front, and then roll it back out again. You connect the ES-200 to your PC via the USB 3.0 cable included in the box.

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Epson rates the ES-200's daily duty cycle at 500 scans, which is the same as the Canon P-215II's ($221.73 at Amazon) rating, and, while the Epson model's maximum resolution is 1,200dpi, the Canon model's is only 600dpi. You can power the ES-200 over USB or AC; just in case your PC's USB ports are not powered (or don't provide enough power). Supported workflow destinations include various popular cloud sites, such as Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive, as well as Folder, Printer, Program, OCR, FTP, and Microsoft SharePoint. Supported file formats are image and searchable PDF, RTF, TXT, TIF, and JPEG, as well as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Setup and Software

Epson informed us recently that it will no longer be including optical discs with its scanners. The good news is that with a simple search for Epson ES-200 software, the appropriate support page displays at the top of the search results list, and from there finding the software bundle is simple. Setting up the ES-200 consists of opening and extending the ADF, connecting to a USB 3.0 port (or powered USB 2.0 port) on your PC, and turning it on.

In addition to the drivers and Epson's scanning utilities, Epson Scan and Epson Document Capture Pro (a document management program of sorts that allows you to set up scanning profiles with workflow destinations), also available for download are Abbyy FineReader Sprint, a scaled down version of the FineReader OCR program, and NewSoft Presto! BizCard, an industry-standard business card scanning and archiving application. Also included is a TWAIN driver for integrated the ES-200 in to third-party scanning applications and other software, such as Adobe Acrobat or an image editor.

Performance

Like the ES-300W, the ES-200 is rated at 25 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 50 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm). Each scan, or page side, is considered an image. In testing, the ES-200's scan speeds were nearly identical to those of the ES-300W. (I tested with Epson Scan at its default 300dpi over USB 3.0 from our standard Core i5 testing PC running Windows 10 Professional.) Without the lag time (the time required after the last page is scanned and the scans are subsequently saved to a usable file format), the ES-200 scanned our test pages at the rate of 28.2ppm and 54.9ipm, which, like it's higher-end wireless sibling, are well over the manufacturer's ratings.

What impressed us most, though, was how fast the software subsequently saved to both image and searchable PDF file formats. The ES-200 scanned and saved our one-sided 20-page text document at 26.9ppm, and our two-sided 20-sheet (40 pages, or images) document at 54.8ipm–still over its rating, and, aside from its higher-priced sibling, uncommon. The Canon P-215II churned at 14.8ppm and 28.4ipm on this portion of our test. (As we pointed out in our review of the ES-300W, neither the IRIScan Anywhere 5 ($99.00 at Amazon) nor the RoadWarrior X3 have ADFs; we can't make meaningful performance comparisons between them and the ES-200.)

Even more unusual was how fast the ES-200 and accompanying software scanned and saved to the more versatile searchable PDF files. It scanned and processed our two-sided 20-sheet (40 images) test document in 47 seconds, which is about the same time that the P-215II took (46 seconds) to scan a similar two-sided 10-page (20 images) document. As we said about the ES-300W, the speeds are comparable to those we've seen from a few full-blown (lower-end, of course) desktop sheet-feed document scanners—very impressive for a scanner in this class.

OCR and Other Tests

Here again, the less-expensive ES-200 converted scanned text to editable text with the same results as the ES-300W, which was a little better than average for a portable scanner, and about average for document scanners in general. The ES-200 converted both our Arial and Times New Roman test font pages without errors down to 8 points. The Canon P-215II managed only 12 points without mistakes on our Times New Roman page, but it converted our Arial test page to editable text down to 6 points. The Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 tied the ES-200 at 8 points for both fonts, as did the IRIScan Anywhere 5.

I also tested how well the ES-200 and BizCard scanned and processed business cards. As we saw with the ES-300W, as well as several other scanners that come bundled with BizCard (and those that are bundled with IRIS's Cardiris), the software handled cards with common fonts laid out on plain white or light-color backgrounds adroitly. But the more complicated the business card, the less successful BizCard was at converting the scanned text to editable text and populating the appropriate fields in the database. When I used color dropout, background removal, and other filters, some of the more complex cards scanned with greater success, but mostly how well BizCard performed depended greatly on the types of business cards I scanned.

Conclusion

The Epson WorkForce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner is a less expensive alternative to the wireless- and battery-equipped ES-300W. The ES-200 is ideal for connecting directly to your laptop via USB, but if you can benefit from scanning wirelessly, or from the convenience of not having to plug your portable scanner into an external power source, the $50 difference between these two models isn't a lot more to pay for these additional features. Otherwise, the ES-200 and the ES-300W have the same capacity, and they perform almost identically. The only reason that the ES-200 has not walked away with an Editors' Choice here is that its more versatile sibling's Wi-Fi connectivity and built-in power source make it a better value.

Epson Workforce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner
4.0
Pros
  • Comes with complete software bundle.
  • Quick scanning and saving to PDF.
  • Powered over USB or AC.
  • Accurate OCR.
  • 20-page ADF.
View More
Cons
  • No battery.
  • Lacks integrated Wi-Fi.
The Bottom Line

The Epson ES-200 is fast and accurate for a portable document scanner, and it includes helpful document management and business card archiving software. But for $50 more, you can get a model with Wi-Fi and a battery.

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About William Harrel

Former Contributing Editor

William Harrel

For nearly a decade, Bill focused on printer and scanner technology and reviews for PCMag, and wrote about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. He authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. His published expertise in those areas included Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over his long career, though, he covered many aspects of IT.)

In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years he also wrote for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. He also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com.

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Epson Workforce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner $254.96 at Amazon
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