High Speed Scanner

The Workforce Pro GT-S50 Sheetfed Scanner offers a daily duty cycle of up to 1200 sheets, plus a 75-page feeder, it’s ready to tackle any obstacle in busy office situations. Scan business cards to rigid ID cards and documents up to 8.5x36 inches.

User Reviews about Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S50 Document Imaging Scanner

This is a pretty good, fast document scanner, but not suitable for photographs. The software installation is disorganized, and software itself is somewhat clunky, but you can get good document images with a little work.

Normally, I do not install any of the software that comes with peripherals except the driver. I tried this strategy with the GT-S50. I installed only the Twain driver, then launched my previously-installed version of Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard for the scanning and OCR. While this works, it turned out the be unsatisfactory. Acrobat is not able to detect the width and height of the scanned documents, and so my scanned images had lots space on the sides and bottom. I was not able to live with that limitation.

So I installed some of the other software that came on one of the CDs with the hope that it would do a better job where Acrobat was deficient. I selected Epson Scan and ABBYY Fine Reader, and skipped PaperPort, which I hate from previous experience. This is the new stuff I ended up with on my start menu under All Programs after the installation:

ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint
-ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint
--User's Guide
EPSON
-EPSON Scan
--EPSON Scan Settings
--EPSON Scan
-GT-S50_S80 User's Guide
--GT-S50_S80 User's Guide
--Uninstall GT-S50_S80 User's Guide
EPSON Scan
-WorkForce Pro GT-S50 Online Support
-WorkForce Pro GT-S50 Scanner Driver Update
Epson Software
-Read Me
--Copy Utility
-Copy Utility
-Event Manager
ISIS Scanner Drivers
-EPSON
--GT-S80 and GT-S50 Users Guide
-ISIS Network Server
-ISIS Network User Guide
-ISIS on Citrix Setup Guide

What a mess. This is shockingly bad. I had to clean this up manually.

ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint Plus does a nice job with the OCR, page size recognition, blank page removal, and export to PDF. It does not suffer form the page size limitation that I found with Acrobat. But the workflow is tedious. To scan a document, you launch FineReader, then press the "Scan&Read" button. Then you get a settings dialog from Epson Scan. There is no way to set this up with defaults so that you can skip this dialog entirely. You have to press "Scan" on this dialog before scanning will start. And after scanning has completed, you have to press "Close" on this dialog in order to return to FineReader. Two extra clicks per scan can add up very quickly to a huge annoyance.

After the scan is complete and you close the Epson Scan dialog, you have to press the Acrobat button on FineReader to export to PDF. This opens the document in Acrobat. The last step is "Save As" in Acrobat so that the PDF file with embedded OCR ends up where you want it. This is more steps than it should be.

I found the scanner to be unbelievably fast at up to 200 dpi. At 240 and above, it gets a little slower. The OCR processing is pretty fast on my machine, but it can't quite keep up with the scanner and is the bottleneck.

I put a stack photographs though the scanner, but found the results to be unsatisfactory because there were streaks on some of the images.

So while I'm keeping the unit for document scanning, it's not everything I had hoped it would be. It's fast, and I like the resulting PDFs of my documents, but the workflow is unnecessarily tedious. I will not be using the GT-S50 to scan photos. -- Tedious workflow but good document scan results.

I've owned several standalone scanners and a couple of all-in-one HP scanners. This was my first Epson scanner and it's the best scanner I've owned. The automatic document feeder has yet to fail - it's never skipped a page. It's not silent by any means, but it's also the quietest scanner I've had. It doesn't take up much space and looks good on my desk.

There are some excellent reviews on amazon's site and I don't think I can improve on them. I highly recommend this scanner.

I purchased the scanner through amazon's Beach Camera affiliate. Their service was excellent. -- Best Scanner I've Ever Purchased

1. I think whether one likes this product vs not, is going to be whether one truly understands the primary purpose of this scanner--> ie as stated via epson, this is a DOCUMENT scanner. Thus, if you want to convert your file cabinet full of paper documents into PDF form--> this is a truly awesome piece of technology. Yes, any cheap flatbed scanner can create the same PDF document, but in most cases, you'll have to manually do one sheet at a time, flip the pages over etc... etc.. ie a huge waste of time and it increases the chances of making a mistake etc... With this scanner, you can put in a pile of papers (I forgot what the limit is, but I would recommend putting in a sensible amount, like 20 or so), you can designate whether the scan should be one sided or double sided--> click the button and it'll do the rest. The time savings is just staggering.

2. By the way, if you're really going to do this correctly (ie in terms of creating PDF files), do yourself a favor and purchase the full version Adobe Acrobat Pro. Why? You'll be able to modify your subsequent PDF documents, you won't have to use the epson software--> just do everything through acrobat pro (actually, you will / can still make modifications through the epson software, but it just seems more streamlined to make the PDFs through acrobat pro).

3. Note: remember the concept of using this scanner for it's true purpose. If you want to use this to scan photos etc... Obviously via the various reviews it can be done, but for various reasons (ie why risk the chance of having a valuable photo accidently caught in the roll mechanism etc...), just utilize a flatbed scanner; the higher the quality of the scan desired, purchase the appropriate scanner. If you have the negative of a photo--> please use a dedicated film scanner. I'm getting off topic, but the bottomline is that no one single scanner will do everything. For document scanning, this is the best. Highly recommended. -- Excellent for it's intended use

Upon receipt this scanner was promptly put to work scanning approximately 22,000 pages of hardcopy projects files. The scan speed exceeded our paper handling speed (removing staples, fixing tears, etc.) Was very pleased with throughput. There were very few jams and most were caused by missed staples or thermal printing paper. Both the scanner and software handled varied sizes and types of papers in a single scan job and overall scan quality was good. Software could be improved by inclusion of optical character recognition at scan time. -- Pleased as punch