Epson DS-320 Portable Duplex Document Scanner With ADF Review

The Epson DS-320 Portable Duplex Document Scanner With ADF ($249) is fast and accurate, much like its higher-end sibling, the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce ES-300W.

This smaller, less-expensive iteration mimics the ES-300W in appearance, volume, and functionality in most ways, but the $50 list-price difference means giving up wireless networking and a built-in battery.

If you don't need these features, though, you can save the 50 bucks and still get a highly capable portable sheet-feed document scanner for the road.

Road Ready

At 2 by 11.3 by 3.5 inches (HWD) and weighing just 2.4 pounds, the Epson DS-320 ($291.72 at Amazon) is about a half inch shorter and half a pound lighter than its ES-300W sibling.

The latter's extra height and girth comes from a 3.6-volt built-in battery that allows it to operate sans AC power.

In fact, the higher-end ES-300W's battery and wireless radio allow it to function without any cables at all.

Closer to the DS-320 in features and size is the Epson WorkForce ES-200 Portable Duplex Document Scanner.

The Visioneer Patriot P15 is slightly bigger and heavier, but it, too, lacks a battery.

Like Epson's ES-300W and ES-200 and the Visioneer Patriot P15, the DS-320 comes with a single-pass 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending multipage, two-sided documents to the scanner.

The Apparent's Doxie Q's ($229.00 at Amazon) ADF, on the other hand, holds only 8 pages, and it cannot scan two sides of a page without help; instead, you must flip the pages manually.

You can control the ES-320 by means of its four buttons (Power, Stop, Cancel, and Start) and three status LEDs (Error, Automatic Feeding Mode, and Ready), or from within the bundled software (more on that below).

Also, on the face of the scanner, to the left of the control panel, you'll find a Mode Selector switch for shifting between automatic document feeding and plastic card scanning.

To scan plastic cards, you insert them into a designated slot on the front edge of the machine, where documents typically scroll out after they've been scanned.

The ES-200, the ES-300W, and the DS-320 all draw the card in through the front, and then roll it back out again.

You connect the ES-320 to your PC via the USB 3.0 cable included in the box.

It connects to your PC via USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 from a slot on the back edge of the scanner.

You can power the DS-320 with the included power cord and adapter, or with the included USB 3.0 cable, connected to either a USB 3.0 slot on your PC or laptop, or to a powered USB 2.0 slot.

The DS-320's maximum resolution is 1,200dpi and its daily duty cycle is 500 scans.

Its workflow profiles include several popular cloud sites, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, as well as Folder, FTP, Microsoft SharePoint, OCR, Printer, and Program.

Supported file formats are JPEG, RTF, TIF, TXT, and image and searchable PDF, as well as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Easy Setup and Comprehensive Software

As with most Epson scanners nowadays, the drivers and other applications in the DS-320's software bundle are not included in the box.

I had to go online to download them, but the instructions in the setup guide are clear.

The entire installation process, from unpacking the scanner to downloading the software to scanning the first page, took me less than 20 minutes.

In addition to the drivers, the following programs are installed: Epson Document Capture Pro, Epson Scan, Abbyy FineReader OCR (a state-of-the-art optical character recognition, or OCR, program), and NewSoft Presto! BizCard (a business card scanning and archiving program).

Epson Scan is the primary scanning utility that the company includes with its scanners and all-in-one printers, and Epson Document Capture Pro is a rudimentary document-management program that lets you define workflow profiles.

I tested the scanner over USB 3.0 with Epson Scan from our standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.

Strong Performance

Given their close specs and similar appearance, I wasn't surprised that the DS-320 tested similarly to the ES-200 and the ES-300W.

On most tests, all three models' results were different from one another by only small fractions of seconds.

When scanning our 25-page one-sided (simplex) test document, for instance, without the lag time (the time between when the last page scans and the scan job is saved to a usable file format), the DS-320 churned at the rate of 28 pages per minute (ppm).

And it scanned our two-sided (duplex) 25-page (50 sides) document at 54.5 images per minute (or ipm, where each image is a page side).

Not only are both scores within spitting distance of those of its two siblings (the ES-300W, for example, scored 27.3ppm and 54.5ipm), both scores are a few pages higher than Epson's ratings of 25ppm and 50ipm for these scanners.

(It's important to note that, since these scanners' ADFs hold only 20 pages, rather than the 25 pages of which our test documents are comprised, I had to reduce the size of the test documents by 5 pages and do a little additional math to get accurate scores.)

See How We Test Scanners

More important than how fast a scanner physically scans pages prior to saving them is how fast the scanner and accompanying software scans and subsequently saves the scanned pages to a useable file, which for our purpose is an image PDF.

The good news is that, like its siblings, the DS-320's lag time when saving to both formats is highly respectable.

It scanned and saved our simplex document at 27.3ppm and our duplex pages at 54.5ppm.

Once again, those scores are within miniscule differences of the DS-320's siblings.

Even more impressive, though, is that, like it's two siblings, the DS-320 managed to maintain similar times when scanning to searchable PDF, a more complex and versatile format than image PDF.

It scanned our 25-page (50 sides) document to searchable PDF in 56 seconds, a second and 2 seconds behind the ES-300W and ES-200, respectively.

It was much faster than the Visioneer P15, which we timed at 1 minute 32 seconds.

One thing to note here though: While, yes, you can run the DS-320 sans AC power via USB, when you do, the scanner reverts to a sort of power-saving mode where it runs about half (perhaps even less) as fast as when it's plugged into the wall.

Conversion Accuracy

The DS-320 scanned our Arial font test page down to 6 points without error, and our Times New Roman page mistake-free down to 8 points.

Eight points is about average for both fonts.

I also scanned a few stacks of business cards into BizCard, with expected results.

The scanner and the software did a good job when scanning simple white or light-colored cards with black or dark text.

Typically, the fancier the business card, the more post-scan editing was required.

As I've said a few times about scanners bundled with BizCard (and Cardiris), it's best to create two separate stacks of cards, one of relatively plain card designs for scanning and another consisting of fancy designs for inputting manually.

To Save $50?

Where portable document scanners are concerned, our current top pick, Epson's WorkForce ES-300W Wireless Portable Duplex Document Scanner, is formidable.

That model's wireless connectivity and onboard battery is a lot to give up for the $50 you save by purchasing the Epson DS-320 Portable Duplex Document Scanner With ADF.

If, however, you just don't need either feature, why spend money for something you won't use when the DS-320 is capable in its own right?