Epson WorkForce

EPSON WorkForce ES-580W. Got it from eBay with "damaged packaging" (not really) from Epson Outlet Store in my country. With a discount code I only paid 324 €. There is also an official promotion by Epson (in Europe only maybe?) where you get 75 € cashback for this scanner, so effectively 249 € which is a VERY good price. Also supports SMB but I'm running Paperless on my VPS, hence I used WebDAV (if you do this: the scanner will do a GET request to the WebDAV url first which must be answered with a 200 OK or it will never try WebDAV). I debated between this scanner and the Brother ADS-1800W but the Brother has a slow UI and no thingy where the paper lands when it's done scanning (not sure how it's called in English).

Really depends on where you're located and what kind of cheap we're talking about. For instance, I buy the overwhelming majority of my equipment used or refurb -- anywhere from Amazon (warehouse deals) to Microcenter / Newegg (open box) to Ebay to sites like PC Server and Parts [0]. I also frequent thrift stores (got a perfectly good Epson Workforce 1100 for $9, just needed ink and a little love). I will say that for some of it, stuff in the "really-cheap-in-comparison-to-MSRP, but still money" category, buying from a vendor that specializes in refurb/off-lease is a safer bet than a mishmash of Ebay parts just in the event that a given component is bad or unreliable. For instance, I recently put together a dual-Xeon box and the riser board was damaged in some way I couldn't repair; PCSP sent me a new one, problem solved. Would've been fairly costly had that been an Ebay buy (especially from a Chinese vendor, the shipping now! my god). All-in, I ended up with case, power supply, riser board, 2x E5-2667v4 CPUs, 256gb ram, GTX 1080ti for like $490. After using some other recycled parts and then selling some old stuff on Ebay, I ended up with a new computer for like 350 bucks... and for being essentially 10 year old equipment, it's shockingly performant. You just never know what you'll find! It takes time to research and decide what you actually want, then locate it at a good price, so you better be in love with the hunt hahaha. [0] https://pcserverandparts.com

I've had great luck with an Epson Workforce scanner. Originally I got it to scan ~10k family photos -- took about 1 hour and entirely smooth. In that case I scanned to a USB drive attached to the scanner (since each photo was a separate file). For Paperless I use the Epson Smart app, scan the document with whatever settings, remove/rotate pages as needed, and then share it to Paperless with Paperless Share [0]. Many network attached scanners can scan to SMB, no device needed, but I kind of like the human-in-the-loop aspect. Since my Paperless server runs on an HDD next to the scanner I can actually hear once the file lands which is quite satisfying. [0] https://github.com/qcasey/paperless_share

A Synology NAS running Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) running Paperless NGX ( https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx ) This works better than I can possibly tell you. I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless. I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today. Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.