Digital Lifestyle > All Reviews > Hardware > Scanners > Multifunctional scanners > Epson GT-S50 review

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 Epson GT-S50 review

Epson’s sheet-fed scanner offers decent speed and great-looking colour scans

James Galbraith

Manufacturer: Epson
Pros: Duplex scanning; easy to use software
Cons: Sluggish scan times when using Adobe Acrobat
Price: £515.83
We rate this 4 out of 5.Star rating:

The GT-S50 from Epson is a desktop document scanner. It has a 75-sheet automatic document feeder and scans both sides of a sheet of paper in one pass, at resolutions up to 600dpi and 24-bit colour.

The GT-S50 is a little larger than most desktop document scanners, but not terribly so. It is also the only document scanner we’ve tested with an LED status menu, which can be helpful when troubleshooting or using presets. Your Mac connects to the GT-S50 via USB 2.0.

The accompanying EpsonScan software is easy to use and should be familiar to anyone who’s used a flatbed Epson scanner in the past. Its not flashy, but its functional, and we’d take that any day.

To test the speed of the scanner, we ran a few tests: a one-page, 300dpi colour scan to a folder using the supplied scanner driver; a 10-page document with a mix of single and double-sided pages, and colour and black-and-white images, and text to a folder using the provided driver; and finally, an OCR scan into Acrobat Professional 9.

The Epson turned in respectable numbers, taking 15 seconds for the single page test and 56 seconds for the 10-page test. The Scan into Acrobat result was on the slow side, taking 29 seconds – that’s nearly three times as long as the Canon ImageFormula DR-2010m.

To test scan quality, we printed the one-page 300dpi scan on our office colour laser printer. The GT-S50 scans were good quality overall, without much in the way of noise or artifacts in the light areas of the image. Colours, though not on the level of a good flatbed scanner, were better than other document scanners we’ve tested.

In our OCR test with Acrobat, the Epson performed very well, requiring little in the way of editing or clean up.

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