HP PS200 Compact Document Scanner Review

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a document-scanning nerd, so I’m on board any time I can get my hands on a new scanner and put it through its paces. In this review, we’ll look at the HP PS200 Compact Document Scanner. We’ll put it through several tests that exercise its capabilities and determine if it’s a good fit to add to any home or commercial office.

HP PS200 Document Scanner Overview

The HP PS200 Compact Desktop Document Scanner is a scanner with colossal potential, marred by bugs and seemingly incomplete software. Scanning is equally fast in single and duplex scanning mode, though the quality adjustment has no effect. Even with the manual page size option selected, the flawed size detection feature is still active, causing a lousy scan every few pages. This could be a great scanner if the software were better remotely finished.

Unboxing and Setup

After recently reviewing the HP PS100 Mobile Document Scanner (the portable counterpart to the PS200), I suspected I’d find similar components and have a familiar unboxing experience with the larger sibling in the HP document scanning tool lineup.

Greeting you as you first open the box is the scanner’s power supply and all the international plugs it supports. The power supply is an international unit ready for use in almost every northern-hemisphere country, with a Type B adapter for North America & Japan, Type G for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and many countries once former U.K. colonies, and Type C for Europe. The power supply could, in theory, accept other prong adapters as it’s a full 100-240V, 50-60Hz unit.

Included with the power supply is a black USB-A to USB-C cable. I am glad we’re moving away from USB-A to USB-B cables.

The PS200 only comes with a Quick Start guide outlining the most essential steps to setting up your device. (I’ve put the whole manual here since it’s difficult to find or even know it exists). This model also doesn’t have a calibration sheet like its mobile counterpart. I guess stationary scanners don’t need calibrating?

To use the scanner, however, you must install the HP WorkScan Software, as I had to do with the HP PS100 Mobile Document Scanner we reviewed. Installing the software, depending on your operating system, you may see a notice that something from C&A Marketing was being configured to run in the background. I covered this in-depth in my PS100 review. The TL;DR is that a company called C&A Global licenses the HP brand and sells these products.

Like the PS100 mobile scanner, The PS200 has a variety of marketing on the document feeder. However, unlike its mobile sibling, the PS200 also has a Letter-size indicator and the A4, A5, and A6 sizes. The document tray has adjustment sliders to allow sheets of any size to fit snugly as they’re sucked in and digitized.

Unlike some desktop-oriented document scanners, the PS200 doesn’t have a very large output tray. It’s not a tray at all. The indicators on what we’ll call a flap demonstrate that documents can also be fed in from the front, which is a neat trick. The front intake method has no adjustment to ensure sheets are fed in straight.

The top surface of the scanner has four buttons: a SCAN button, which triggers a scan, a power button, and two numeral buttons, 1 and 2. The numerically indicated buttons act as a toggle and configure single or double-sided scanning.

Tests and Benchmarks

Placing a document in the scanner will cause the power LED to blink three times, indicating that it has detected a sheet of paper and is ready to consume its physical media.

Pressing the SCAN button, the PS200 scanned the sheet of paper quickly and relatively quietly. While there are a few more moving parts in this unit compared to the incredibly quiet PS100, The desktop device averaged just 56 dB during the scan process at a foot away, peaking at 66 dB during the mechanical clicks during intake. This level of sound is equivalent to rustling leaves, so you’re certainly not disturbing folks near you with any potential high-volume document digitization dilemmas you may have.

In testing the various scan qualities, I ran into the same issue as with the PS100: adjusting the quality (DPI) did not affect the scan. Testing 300 DPI, 600 DPI, and 1200 DPI, all three files turned out more or less identically in file size, image quality, and scan time, telling me the setting isn’t being honored.

With the rear reader, I had no issue with documents being scanned straight. The forward-facing input gently grabs the sheet of paper and holds it in place. It pulls the paper through the device, out the back (not up the rear document tray) hits the reverse gear when the scan is complete, and spits it back out. I had a bit of a more challenging time getting things lined up since there is no guide to help, so this type of input may be better suited for things like cards, IDs, and photos than documents.

Double-sided Scanning

For this test, I’m using a 25-sheet (50-page) document, the max the scanner will hold in its rear, upright document feeder tray. I switched to double-sided mode using the button on the top face of the device and went to town.

This is really where the device should have a front-facing tray. There is nowhere for the sheets of paper to land after coming out of the device. I had the front flap down during the first run, and because of that, the pages were not completely clearing the device, and the following page would end up underneath the one just scanned, causing everything to go out of order. Putting the flap up and rerunning the test helped a lot, though you’ll also likely want to ensure you have at least a foot of room in front of the device for pages to land safely and in the order they were scanned.

Some of my pages also had an odd edge-detection issue during this test. In the first run, the sides were being cut off. The second run didn’t see that, but the tops and bottoms were cut off strangely. In a third scan, I had a mix of misalignment issues. I cannot adjust the detection area. (When I ran into this issue with the PS100, I switched to a specific page size, away from “Detect Page.” Ensuring my settings were correct during this review didn’t help.)

Save for those oddities, scanning was quick and consistent, with no discernable speed difference between single-sided and double-sided scanning.

Our Verdict

I think the HP PS200 Compact Document Scanner has huge potential. Save for needing to use the HP WorkScan software to use the scanner and the fact that scanning multiple sheets at once all but guarantees you’ll eventually have a page detection miss (even with the setting turned off) and a wasted scan, this device would make a great addition to any home or commercial office. A firmware update may solve that, but until then, I have difficulty recommending this to anyone looking to scan multiple sheets simultaneously. If you’re doing single sheets at a time, then the PS200 would be a fantastic unit.