Epson takes away the pain of archiving scrappy bits of paper, receipts, and business cards with the RapidReceipt RR-600W scanner.

Decades after the promise of a paperless office, we still find ourselves inundated with bits of paper. My desk is littered with hastily written scribbles on torn-out pages from notebooks, 500mm long receipts, and business cards. I wish it would all go away. But it is important stuff. Unfortunately, there’s nothing my otherwise trusted scanner hates more than a dog-eared bit of paper.

Epson’s RapidReceipt RR-600W aims to do away with the last vestiges of physical office paperwork. It’s a fully-functioning compact A4 desktop scanner that is not afraid to copy unloved bits of paper.

Setting up the scanner was easy. Connectivity is via Wi-Fi network or direct connection via the included USB Type-A cable.  There’s no Ethernet port for a wired network connection. Connecting to the wireless network was easy. There are options for WPS or a manual network connection setup.

The scanner comes with a suite of software, updated versions of which can be downloaded from the Epson website. The full manual, which is better than the quickstart manual provided with the equipment, can also be downloaded.

The device has a small LCD similar to Epson’s multifunction printers allowing for scanning across the network, via email, or to the cloud. The RapidReceipt uses Epson Scan 2, the same as my Epson multifunction printer. Strangely, I seemed to have to reconnect to the RapidReceipt each time even though my Epson ET-4750 was readily available. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to get to bottom of this.

The scanner’s feeder seems to have been borrowed from the awesome Epson FastFoto FF-680W. Just as the FastFoto can handle scanning photos thrown in willy-nilly, the RapidReceipt can do the same with scrunched-up receipts and invoices.

I stuffed a load of old creased-up post office receipts in the machine and hit scan. Expecting the scanner to chew them all up, I was surprised to see them feed through and into the receiving tray without a hitch, turning them into one continuous PDF on my PC. The device can also scan to JPEG, TIFF, multi-TIFF, searchable PDF, secure PDF, PDF/A.

The RR-600W also came in surprisingly handy, due to it accepting up to A4 sheets, for scanning the kids’ dog-eared worksheet for their teachers to mark. This somewhat eased the stress of home-schooling whilst in Sydney’s lockdown.

As well as scanning receipts, the RapidReceipt can be used as a regular colour duplex A4 scanner. I did find that the general scanning quality was not as good as my multifunction printer. Despite cleaning the scanners, colour scans were a bit streaky.

The scanner has an icon on the feeder that looks like a credit card. It does not scan plastic cards, but it does scan business cards very well.

The unit is quite small but rather heavy. It’s certainly portable enough to take around a client’s premises if you are the one tasked with tidying up their collection of receipts. Simply plug the scanner into a laptop and you’ve got a scanning solution for go-the-go.

The Epson RapidReceipt RR-600W takes the trouble out of scanning in receipts and scrappy bits of paper, easily turning them into digital files that can be OCRed or filed using the bundled applications.