IRIScan Express 4 Review

A sibling to (and $30 less than) the IRIScan Executive 4 reviewed here back in July 2019, the $139 IRIScan Express 4 is an attractive manual-feed portable document scanner. This entry-level device scans a single document side at a time (simplex scanning), and works well when capturing small documents such as receipts, invoices, business or ID cards, and credit cards. Unfortunately for IRIS (a Canon subsidiary), the Express 4 doesn't stand out from a crowd of competitors—shop for any time at all, and you'll find loads more well-built, snappy, and affordable portable scanners out there. But if your scanning needs center on miscellaneous items and one- or two-page documents on the road, the IRIScan Express 4 is a capable choice.

Before diving into the details of the Express 4, I should point out that there are basically two types of portable scanners: single-sheet devices like this one that you feed one page at a time, and sheetfed machines with automatic document feeders (ADFs) that can scan 10- to 20-page documents without manual intervention. Two excellent examples of the latter are the Editors' Choice-award-winning WorkForce ES-300W Portable Wireless Duplex Document Scanner from Epson and Fujitsu's ScanSnap iX1300.

As for portable single-sheet scanners like today's IRIScan, the number available is dizzying, with some vendors such as Brother and Epson offering multiple versions and new products popping up all the time.

Getting back to the IRIScan Express 4, it measures 1.3 by 11.4 by 2 inches (HWD) and weighs just under a pound. These specs are fairly typical for devices like this, including not only its Executive 4 sibling but the Brother DSmobile DS-940DW, the Epson DS-80W Wireless Portable Scanner, and the Epson WorkForce ES-60W—the latter three all PCMag favorites.

Like most portable scanners, the Express 4 has very few onboard controls and no desktop-scanner-style control panel for executing scans directly from the device itself. In fact, as you can see in the image below, the only control to speak of is the power button. You can also see the ruler-like markings along the length of the input slot; these tell you where to line up various document or photo sizes while inserting them into the scanner. Here's a closer look...

The scanner supports document sizes ranging from business cards (2.2 by 3.5 inches) to A4 or letter-size media and resolutions up to 1,200dpi. Connectivity is limited to a USB cable (no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support). The USB port joins a Kensington-style security lock slot on the rear of the device. The USB port is on the right side in the image below.

The IRIScan can handle business cards, photos, plastic or laminated cards (including embossed items), and receipts up to 0.8mm thick. It accepts paper in weights up to 28-pound.

While the Executive 4 is rated for 100 scans per day, I couldn't find a daily duty cycle or recommended maximum for the Express 4. It's safe to assume the new portable scanner is strictly a light-duty device like its predecessor.

With no front-panel controls, the scanner is designed to be operated completely via software, in this case the downloadable Readiris and Cardiris apps. The former is a combination scanner interface and document management program, while the latter is what it sounds like: a program for business-card scanning and contact management and archiving.

Readiris lets you access several preconfigured workflow profiles or shortcuts, and also allows you to define, create, and edit your own. The program is capable of optical character recognition (OCR) to convert scanned documents to searchable or editable text in as many as 138 languages.

The app supports custom file naming and the ability to save to a wide variety of file formats, including single- and multi-page PDF, JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF and multi-TIFF, RTF, plain text, Microsoft 365 DOC and XLS, XPS, XLSX, PPTX, and HTML.

As a scanner and a document-management utility, Readiris offers PDF editing and archiving abilities that are robust indeed. An indexed PDF option allows you to create documents with keywords and search terms. You can even export to a few different audio formats and have your scans read to you.

A critical piece of Readiris is Button Manager, a terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) utility that resides in the Windows system tray. It comes with access to nine preconfigured workflows, including scanning to cloud site, email, image, or searchable or indexed PDF. Button Manager lets you use the presets as is or alter them to scan and save documents as you like. All aspects of your scans, including resolution, one-sided (simplex) or two-sided (duplex) scanning, and destination, are controlled from Button Manager and its shortcuts. (Since I mentioned duplex scanning, let me repeat that, as a simplex scanner, the Express 4 has only one scanning sensor, meaning that for double-sided documents, you must feed them through the scanner twice, once to capture each side.)

Finally, there's Cardiris, an industry-standard utility for business-card scanning and archiving contacts. Cardiris and the scanner itself make for a highly useful and capable business contact management system.

IRIScan rates the Express 4's scanning speed at 8 pages per minute (ppm), though, like with all manual-feed scanners, this depends largely on you. How quickly and efficiently it scans each page depends partly on how quickly and efficiently you feed it.

Because of that factor, I didn't try to quantify duplex scanning speeds. But my experience with manual-feed portable scanners is that it requires a few tries to become proficient at feeding documents to the device. After some practice, I was able to process up to 10 or 11 pages per minute at times. (That was using Readiris on our Intel Core i5 Windows 10 Pro testbed PC, connected to the scanner via USB.) The scanner and software kept up without breaking a sweat.

When scanning our usual single-sided 25-page text document, the Express 4 and I averaged about 9 pages per minute (ppm). Obviously, this machine wasn't built to process documents that long; if you need to scan lengthy documents, you should check out the Epson ES-300W or another portable scanner with an ADF.

Note that 9ppm is a little slow versus most of the other machines mentioned here. When testing the Epson DS-80, for instance, I managed 11.6ppm, and the Brother DS-940DW managed 13.5ppm. Frankly, though, 2ppm or 3ppm isn't really a huge speed gap, and these numbers aren't very important for the infrequent, low-volume scanning that these devices are designed for.

Typically (and like with this model), it's a scanner's bundled software that does the job of converting an image of a block of text to searchable or editable text, often to Adobe Acrobat's PDF file type or to Microsoft Word. The IRIScan Express 4 scanned both our sans-serif (Arial) and serif (Times New Roman) test documents in sizes down to 6 points error-free.

That's normal for today's high-quality scanners and software, though chances are that you'll seldom, if ever, encounter business documents with text smaller than 10 points. OCR software engines have become so precise that it's notable only if a device strays from the norm.

I also scanned a couple of stacks of business cards into Cardiris and financial documents (including receipts and invoices) into Readiris. As usual with Cardiris and its competitors, relatively clean business cards devoid of fancy fonts or gradient or shading effects arrived just fine. The program gleaned addresses, phone numbers, company names, and other data from the cards and stored it in the proper fields for export to Outlook or another contact manager.

I had similar success with the financial data after some initial setup. Readiris sorted and stored the data for export to bookkeeping, tax prep, and other applications with relative ease.

Except for its inability to scan both sides of a page simultaneously, we can't think of a telling reason not to opt for the IRIScan Express 4. The hardware is exemplary (for a single-sheet, manual-feed scanner, that is), and Readiris is a feature-rich scanning utility that combines relatively robust document management with first-class OCR. This is a fine scanner, though considering its many competitors, we'd rate it higher if it sold south of $100.

The IRIScan Express 4 is a capable, if unremarkable, manual-feed portable document scanner for feeding pages, receipts, and business cards to your laptop on road trips.

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