While modern technology has reduced the amount of paper in most of our lives, it hasn’t yet ushered in the “paperless society” that many predicted it would. At the end of the day, if you want a paperless office, sometimes you still need to take matters into your own hands. This is where products like Epson’s new DS-530 Color Duplex Document Scanner ($400) come into play. This high-powered duplex sheet-fed scanner can be a big help in getting control of at least some of the clutter in your office.
Drop up to 50 sheets into the automatic document feeder and the DS-530 will zip through them at up to 35 pages-per-minute, scanning both sides in a single pass. In addition to traditional paper documents, the DS-530 can also scan folder pages, rigid ID cards, and stacks of business cards. Dynamic skew protection helps keep your scans straight and double-feed detection technology prevents jams, and there’s now even a slow speed mode for wrinkled or fragile papers. A dual-core CPU with hardware acceleration also allows for faster scans, offloading much of the work from your Mac. Epson includes its own suite of document capture and OCR apps for scanning to your Mac, as well as ISIS/TWAIN drivers to plug it into your favorite apps. There’s also direct support for cloud services like Evernote or Dropbox, but if you’d prefer to keep your documents out of the cloud, the included OCR software lets you create searchable PDFs that you can save right on your Mac.
