No word on Epson on when (or if!) they’ll be releasing 10.7 drivers and software for this scanner, even though it’s the only workforce model you can actually find and buy in the real world!

Oddly enough, my Fujitsu S500 hasn’t had a single problem with the transition to 10.7, even though it was a windows model hacked to work with Mac!

The Epson promised greater flexibility with twain drivers, but so far it makes using 3rd party scanning software a necessity rather than an option. So, Fujitsu for the win, and Epson for the return.

The other thing that is true of all scanners is that scan speed slows dramatically as the DPI count goes up.
in other words, if you need to scan 300 dpi, you’re looking at more like 10-12 sheet feeds a minute (thats still one ever 6 seconds or so which isn’t bad)

You didn’t say if your running Windows or Mac, or what your needs are (Sounds like you just need PDF files created & I’ll assume you’re on Windows)
If my assumptions about your needs are correct, you might try out the Fujitsu scansnap S1500 scanner (or the slower S1300) The Fujitsu scanscaps have some limitations – you can only use them with the software they provide, but they do come with acrobat, and they are pretty well streamlined around scanning to PDF’s all day long. For my needs, I wanted/needed twain compatibility and the ScanSnaps don’t have that.

A few other tips I can give you.
Make sure you’re using the latest drivers from Epson’s website.
Start by having the scanner plugged directly into a usb port on the back of the machine – do not use a usb hub or switch – you can add those in later once you know the scanner works.
If you have adobe acrobat, use that to do your scans, (My mac edition has a ‘document’ menu, then ‘scan to pdf..’ windows should have something similar.
At least on the mac, I’ve noticed the scanner seems to have 3 speeds: 200 dpi and below is blazingly fast and is likely the published 50 ppm, 300dpi is probably half speed of 200dpi and 600dpi is about 1/4 speed.
I find that 200dpi is fine for most of my needs so that’s what I use.
Also, at least on the mac, it feels like the scanner has a buffer of about 4 pages or so. If I drop in a stack of papers, a few will shoot through really fast, then it will pause then grab a few more, etc. I believe it must scan to an internal buffer then send that buffer to the Computer. Knowing this could help you pick setting that are less annoying. ie scanning 8 pages Black and white single sided at 200dpi might be not fill the buffer, while scanning one or two double sided color pages at 600dpi very well might cause the scanner to pause as it sends that data to the PC.

I hope this helps

I recently rebuilt my mac and I was curious where the Image Capture Driver came from – it comes from apple – Image Capture worked with the GT-S50 before I ever installed the drivers from Epson.

My workflow is basically to use Acrobat to scan via Twian (Acrobat on the mac doesn’t support Image Capture nor ISIS drivers) which has worked out pretty well.

The Image capture app from apple can also create PDF’s but they aren’t searchable and they are quite a bit (5-10x) larger than the PDF’s Acrobat creates.

I think the Epson is a solid scanner for the money (Cheaper than the Canon and Fujitsu)
I am still curious about the Canon, as it was rated faster and still has twian drivers.
Unfortunately for Canon (and me) there wasn’t anywhere I could go see/get one.

Other than twain, I don’t think you can go wrong with ScanSnap- people seem to love them, and it comes with Acrobat, which is a must have. It is disappointing that there is no twain driver, which means there might be scenarios in the future where you have to scan to a Tiff file then import it into another program- that said, 99.5% of what we scan we likely want in PDF format, and I think the ScanSnap has that down, plus although late, I think Fujitsu’s been pretty good about supporting older product with drivers.