The GT-1500, however, includes both a 40 page automatic document feeder (ADF) and a letter size flatbed. The flatbed can be useful if you need to scan book or magazine pages or other originals that won't go through a sheet feeder. Setting up the scanner is straight forward. It measures a compact 4.8 by 18.5 by 12.5 inches (HWD), which is impressively small for a scanner with both an ADF and a flatbed, and it weighs just 8.6 pounds.
Like some other document scanners with flatbeds notably, the closely competitive Canon DR-1210C it's designed to sit in landscape orientation as you face it, with the front panel on one of the long sides and the lid opening toward the back. To set up the GT-1500, simply run the automated installation routine from disc, plug in the power cord and a USB cable, and let Windows recognize the scanner.
It installed it on a Windows XP system, but according to Epson, it also comes with drivers for Windows 2000, Vista, and Mac OS 10.3x through 10.5x. For Windows, the trio of Twain, WIA, and ISIS drivers ensures that you can scan directly from virtually any Windows program with a scan command.The software for Windows includes an optical character recognition (OCR) program (Abbyy FineReader 6.0 Sprint Plus), a document management program (ScanSoft PaperPort version 11), and Epson's own scan utility. For the Mac, the disc also includes a Twain driver and OCR software, but no document management program.
You can start a scan from a program, from Epson's scan utility, or from one of the four scan buttons on the front panel. The copy button brings up a copy utility on the PC the PDF button scans to your choice of image PDF or search able PDF format and the email button creates a new message using your PC's email program, adding the scanned document as an attachment. There's also a generic scan button that brings up the Epson scan utility, so you can scan to a file.
Available formats include Bitmap, JPEG, Multi-TIFF, TIFF, and PDF. The GT-1500's optical scan resolution is 1,200 pixels per inch (ppi) for scanning from the flatbed, but the software limits the scanner to 600 ppi for scanning from the ADF. This is a bit unusual, but 600 ppi is typical for document scanners and is more than enough resolution for scanning documents. It's even more than enough for scanning photos, unless you plan to enlarge them significantly.
