Epson WorkForce DS-1730

Is the Epson WorkForce DS-1730 worth buying?

Yes, the Epson WorkForce DS-1730 is worth buying at £259.99 if your paperwork is a mix of two jobs: stacks of loose A4 that want a feeder, and the awkward originals that want glass. A 60-sheet automatic document feeder swallows the first lot, and the flatbed underneath takes the passports, bound reports and creased receipts that would jam any feeder. Ten buyers rate it 4.4.

It suits a small office or a home office with real volume rather than a household scanning the occasional letter. A 3,000-sheet peak daily duty cycle means it is built for a working day of invoices, not for a shoebox of photos once a year. If everything you scan is flat A4 and nothing else, you are paying for a flatbed you will not lift.

How fast is the Epson WorkForce DS-1730 in real use?

Divide its £259.99 price by the 30 pages per minute it scans and the DS-1730 costs £8.67 for every page per minute, which is 5p more than the £388 ScanSnap iX2500's £8.62 and £2.06 less than the Epson WorkForce ES-500WII's £10.73. It runs both sides in a single pass at 30 ppm, so a 60-page contract is 30 sheets into the feeder and roughly two minutes of your time.

The flatbed side is the number the others cannot match: 7 seconds per page at 300 dpi. That is slow next to the feeder, but it is the difference between scanning a passport and photographing it on a phone. The 1,200 dpi optical resolution is for the flatbed side, and it leaves plenty of headroom for text, signatures and stamped documents at normal settings.

What comes with the Epson WorkForce DS-1730 and how does it fit on a desk?

It arrives as one mains-powered unit weighing 4.94 kg and measuring 37.4 cm deep, 42.5 cm wide and 13.5 cm high, which is roughly the footprint of a small printer. It draws 9 watts, so it adds almost nothing to a bill even left plugged in. The feeder takes originals from 10.5 x 14.8 cm right up to 21.6 x 304.8 cm, which covers everything from a business card to a long till roll.

Connection is a USB cable to a PC or Mac, with TWAIN and ISIS drivers for existing document software and Epson Document Capture for scanning straight to email or cloud storage. Windows 11, 10, 8 and 7 are all covered, as is macOS. It carries a 12-month warranty, and colour output is 24-bit. There is no wireless radio and no battery, so plan where the cable reaches before you order.

Where does the Epson WorkForce DS-1730 fall short?

It is a wired machine: USB only, with no Wi-Fi and no Bluetooth, so it stays within cable reach of one computer. That rules it out if you want to scan from a phone in another room, which is exactly what the £375.53 Epson WorkForce ES-500WII offers instead.

At 4.94 kg and 42.5 cm wide it is the heaviest and widest scanner in the top half of this group, so it wants a permanent desk corner rather than a shelf. Its 1,200 dpi does not compete with the 4,800 dpi flatbed models if you also want to digitise photographs. Only 10 buyers have rated it so far, so the 4.4 is a thin sample to lean on.

Epson WorkForce DS-1730 vs Brother ADS-4100 and ScanSnap iX2500

The Brother ADS-4100 costs £44.97 more at £304.96 and scans 35 ppm against the DS-1730's 30, with a 60-sheet feeder and mixed media from 40 to 200 gsm in one batch. It weighs 2.6 kg against 4.94 kg, so it suits a desk that has to stay tidy. What it cannot do is lift a lid: with no flatbed, a passport or a bound report stops the job.

The ScanSnap iX2500 costs £128.01 more at £388 and runs 45 ppm through a 100-sheet feeder, with Wi-Fi 6 and a 5-inch touchscreen for sending files without a computer. For high-volume loose A4 it is the faster machine, and its £8.62 per page per minute edges the DS-1730's £8.67 by 5p. The DS-1730 is the better buy the moment bound or embossed documents are part of the job.