Epson ES-580W - Wi-Fi

Epson WorkForce ES-580W Wi-Fi High-speed Auto Feed Colour Scanner with Touchscreen and OCR Software : desertcart.co.uk: Computers & Accessories Review: Love it! - I purchased the ES-580W and it's a lovely looking device, and smaller than I thought it would be. I’ve actually put it on the front room next to a vase as I like looking at it. I often go to court to defend my data protection rights and this process generates a lot of paperwork. I've been using the Canon imageFormula P-150 for many years but I had so many issues with double-feeds that I have to feed each page in one by one. It did a good job though. So, the main criteria for this scanner was that it needed to have the technology to prevent double-feeds. I also liked the idea of scanning directly to USB without having to use my PC. I had it up and running within minutes and I was scanning to USB. I was a bit concerned at first because it started beeping every time I pressed a button on the screen and that would have done my head in but fortunately there’s an option to set the sound to zero. I’ve also figured out how to set my user settings – 600dpi, colour, PDF, single document, duplex. When I get any post now, all I need to do is turn it on, scan the letter to USB and shred it. It took about 10 minutes to scan a 30 page document and I think it is the saving to USB process that is slows it down. It’s not an issue though for someone who is used to scanning page by page. My mission now is to scan in everything stored in my three drawer metal filing cabinet. My only niggle so far is that the touch screen is a bit sensitive and therefore, difficult to scroll. For example, when I try to scroll down the menu I often select an option by mistake. This is not a big issue though as I’ve now saved my settings. Review: A significant upgrade from my feed-failure old Canon DR-C225W - After ample confusion of choice and research, I finally decide to buy this rather than buy a Canon DR-C225W II, or any another Canon and Brother scanner, because: * The Canon DR-C225W II looks to still use the same flawed sheet-feeding mechanics and sensors as the Canon DR-C225W, including the same overpriced rollers! Possibly hiding designed-in obsolesce too. * This document scanner has USB 3, which later proved it's worth, and WiFi, also allowing use over network, a decent sized touch screen and far more powerful functionality, including a contacts directory and direct send to file shares, email, cloud, etc. * Epson seems to provide Linux support for most/ALL of their scanners, unlike the pathetically limited Linux support of Canon and Brother, contrary to some web articles about document scanners for Linux! * Other makes and models were far too expensive for equivalent functionality, with Ethernet support being shockingly more expensive, than the price of a decent USB 3 Gigabit Ethernet adaptor, maybe only 100Mbit too! * This only cost me £279.99 via the recent Prime day sale, bargain. Pros: * It is small enough that it does take up much desk space and maybe portable in a large laptop backpack. * The paper exit bends the paper far less that the U travel to the Canon DR-C225W exit sheet slot, is simpler, and has a higher capacity optional pull-out tray. * Hopefully the, initially confusing, pull off-the-back (queue-type) sheet feeding, will ensure more reliable feeding, and top-first (upside-down sheet) scanning, will ensure faster throughput, with less need for feeder maintenance, than the pull-off the front (stack-type) sheet feeding and bottom-first scanning, with spurious feed failures, of the Canon DR-C225W and probably C225W II too. * Epson provide a downloadable "Epson Scan 2" desktop GUI with a "epsonsane2" SANE backend for Linux, with useful options, which works for USB 3, and source code separately; the latter probably to support other Linux distributions and CPUs. They even support Linux for ARM 32-bit and 64-bit, so it's probably usable by a Raspberry Pi with enough RAM. * The "epsonsane2" backend was faster and more functional than the SANE provided driver, for both USB and network devices. * The USB 3 connection really shows its value for 1200DPI A4 scans. * Network seems good enough up to 600DPI A4 scans, which should be good enough for more uses. * For Linus, the github.com/cyanfish/naps2 deb SANE frontend worked great with it for both USB and network, (epsonsane2) devices, generating a searchable (OCR'd) PDF from a multi-page duplex document, and is probably a better SANE frontend than the "Epson Scan 2" GUI for most uses. Cons: * "Epson Scan 2" for Linux failed to scan anything via network device, despite triggering the scanner to show the "Load originals." screen, whereas other SANE frontends worked fine, hmm! It also lacks a lot of the other functionality of the Windows bundle, and does not appear to support auto-generation unique filenames for saved files, which may cause accidental overwrite of prior saved files, and does not allow page view/edit before pages saving. * I can't say I was impressed by the Windows utils for it either; so maybe NAPS2 would also be better for it on Windows too. * This document scanner doesn't appear to support 5G WiFi, because my router listed it as a 2.4G connected Wi-Fi device; and when I test scanned A4 pages at 1200DPI using NAP2, it was a noticeably slower transferring the page images than over USB 3! 1 star dropped for not supporting 5G WIFI. Notes: * WPS WiFi setup didn't want to work for me (maybe an ISP router issue), but WiFi was easy to manually setup using the touchscreen. I'm wary of WPS, anyway, because it's a security risk, even for only 2 minutes. * Beware of brscan4 (official Brother SANE backend) for Linux, I had it installed, and mine had a broken libsane-brother4.so.1 causing a seg. fault, causing puzzling exits of multiple SANE frontends; so I had to uninstall it! This is one reason why decent and maintained Linux support is so important, also why the SANE maintainers need to cut the lame "proprietary" excuses, and trap and log device-backend load failures, to prevent puzzling (seg fault crashed) disappearance of SANE frontends! Update 2025-11-03: I discovered that the "Epson Scan 2" desktop GUI for Linux provided the option to scan extended length pages, with no specified length limit, at 300 DPI (max allowed for this mode). Speculatively, I tried to scan some very-wide old landscape school photographs sideways, each approximately 2 to 3 times A4 height, and it worked. I later rotated the images back to landscape and re-saved them, to view them and zoom in. Before that I could only to use a flat scanner and scan multiple sections which was obviously disjointed to view; it would probably have been hard to trim the overlays and splice all of the sections into one image for each photograph. I may later try to specify a custom page-size of the photograph dimensions, to see if the scanner can support scanning them at higher DPI, to allow seeing more detail.