The Epson DS-80W Wireless Portable Document Scanner ($169) is exceptionally small, light, fast, and accurate, making it ideal for capturing short documents on the road. It has a built-in rechargeable battery, which allows you to scan wirelessly and increases the flexibility as to when and where you can use it. These perks, along with its respectable accuracy and Epson's highly useful scanner interface and software, are more than enough to make this portable scanner an Editors' Choice.
Small, Light, and Portable
At 1.3 by 10.7 by 2.8 inches (HWD) and 0.7 pound, the DS-80W is smaller and lighter than several other manual-feed models we've tested, including the Editors' Choice Xerox Duplex Travel Scanner, and the Visioneer RoadWarrior X3 (another Editors' Choice model). The IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFI, though, is negligibly close in size to and weighs slightly more than the DS-80W. The only portable scanner I could find that is smaller and lighter than the DS-80W is Epson's own DS-70, but it is neither wireless nor does it have an internal power source.
As a single-sheet-feed scanner, of course, you can load the DS-80W with only one page at a time, and, when it finishes that page, you handfeed it another, and so on, as opposed to a multi-sheet-feed device that comes with an automatic document feeder (ADF). These portable machines, which include the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce ES-300W ($289.00 at Amazon) , are bigger and cost a lot more than the manual-feed models do. The ES-300W, for instance, lists for about twice as much as the DS-80W.
To initiate a scan, you feed one- or two-sided pages in to the slot on the front…
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Both sides of two-sided documents are scanned simultaneously, and you feed business cards, receipts, and other narrow items at the far left end of the slot, as designated by the icon located there (and outlined in red in the image below)…
Typically, what happens with your scan, such as its resolution (up to 1,200dpi), document format, destination, and so on, is defined in the software on the computing device the scanner is connected to. Though the DS-80W does have a small control panel, its purpose is primarily to choose connection types and display status.
Across the top-right end of the chassis, you'll find a Start/Stop toggle and a small LED that displays the following status lights: Automatic Feeding Mode, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi AP (Access Point status), Battery, and Error. And, to the right of the LED is a Ready status light…
On the right-front edge resides the Wi-Fi Switch (for toggling back and forth between Wi-Fi and USB, the DS-80W's only two connectivity options), Wi-Fi Connect (for connecting via Wi-Fi Protected Setup, or WPS), and the Power button, and on the right end cap there's a mini USB slot for charging and/or a data connection…
As mentioned, everything else is controlled by Epson Scan Utility 2 and Epson Document Capture Pro on your PC (Document Capture on a Mac), or DocumentScan on your Android or iOS mobile device…
Unfortunately, DocumentScan doesn't convert image PDFs to searchable PDFs, but I found several highly rated free PDF readers/editors at both the Apple Store and Google Store that are more than capable of optical character recognition (OCR) and most other PDF-editing tasks.
Fast for Small Jobs
Epson rates the DS-80W at 4 seconds per page, or 15 pages per minute (ppm). As I've said about many single-sheet-feed portable scanners, though, due to the human factor involved in feeding pages to the machine, coming up with an accurate scanning speed isn't really possible. The best I can do is describe my experience while performing and timing my tests and how I came up with the numbers reported here. I tested the DS-80W over USB 2.0 using Epson Scan 2 on PCMag's standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.
The DS-80W did indeed scan a single page, even two-sided ones, in about 4 seconds, which is great for short one- and two-page documents. Our test documents, though, consist of 25 one-sided pages and 25 two-sided pages. To maintain a speed of 4 seconds, and therefore achieve scores of 15ppm for one-sided pages and 30 images per second (or ipm, where each page side is an image), I had to sit there, poised and ready to feed each page, one after the other, as each preceding page finished scanning.
Obviously, the DS-80W and its ilk aren't designed to scan long documents like these. The best I could do was 11.6ppm and 23.3ipm, well short of the scanner's ratings but significantly faster than the other manual-feed scanners we've reviewed recently. These times are more than twice as fast as those of the Xerox Duplex Travel Scanner and the Visioneer X3, though the X3 and the IRIScan Anywhere 5 WiFi don't support automatic two-sided scanning. The Anywhere 5 did a little better on one-sided scans than the Xerox and Visioneer models did, but it still fell behind the DS-80W by about 4ppm.
I can also report that, as it usually does, Epson's software saved the scans to image and searchable PDF about as fast as I could feed the pages to the scanner, which, in other words, means that scanning and saving to these formats didn't take much longer than the scanner itself took to roll each sheet across the sensors. I didn't time these processes, though. Why? Well, if you plan to scan a lot of multipage documents, this is not your scanner. Suffice it to say that the DS-80W is plenty fast enough to keep up as you feed it pages.
Business-Worthy Accuracy
But no matter how fast a scanner is, it's nothing if it's not accurate. The DS-80W scanned both our Arial and Times New Roman font test pages without errors down to 6 points, which is a small typeface for most business applications. Only the Xerox Travel Scanner, at 5 points error-free on the Arial page and 6 points for Times New Roman, did a little better. Both the Visioneer and the IRIScan models managed 8 points without mistakes, which isn't exactly terrible, either.
Portable, Fast, and Accurate
Keep in perspective that the DS-80W is designed for short documents, such as orders at trade shows, soccer league enrollment forms, business cards, and so on. If you see many multipage scans in your road-warrior future, you really should consider something with an ADF, such as the aforementioned Editors' Choice Epson ES-300W. The additional money you spend will be easily counterbalanced by the time and aggravation you avoid. But if your needs only require scanning a few sheets at a time while on the go, the DS-80W is an exceptional performer.
The Epson DS-80W is a fast and accurate single-sheet-feed portable document scanner ideally suited for scanning short jobs to your laptop or smartphone on the road.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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