Why this question never gets a clean answer
Post it in a woodworking group and watch. Half the replies will tell you the infeed and outfeed tables must be dead flat with the bed. The other half will tell you to raise the outer ends slightly, usually with a penny or a business card under a long straightedge. Both groups are certain, both have been doing it for years, and both can show you good boards.
They are both partly right, and the reason is that angling the tables up trades one problem for another. Knowing what you are trading helps you decide whether the trade is worth it for the work you do.
What angling the tables actually does
Snipe on a benchtop planer comes from a load change. Two rubber rollers hold the board down, one before the cutterhead and one after. When both are carrying the board, the machine sits in a steady state. At the start of the cut only the infeed roller is loaded, and at the end only the outfeed roller is. In those two moments the carriage flexes slightly and the cutting plane drops a few thousandths closer to the board.
Raising the outer ends of the tables tips the board very slightly upward at exactly those two moments. The leading end rides a hair higher going in, and the trailing end rides a hair higher coming out. That counteracts the flex, and the snipe gets shallower or disappears.
It genuinely works. That is not in dispute.
What it costs you
If the ends of the board are being held above the plane the cutterhead is referencing, then the middle of the board is not. You are no longer feeding a board across a flat reference. You are feeding it across a very shallow arc.
The result is a board that is slightly thicker at the ends and slightly thinner through the middle, which reads as a gentle bow along its length. On a short piece you will never see it. On long stock, and on anything thick enough that you were counting on flatness, it shows up, and it shows up as a curve rather than the sharp step that snipe produces.
Owners who go looking for this find it. One of the most widely shared snipe fixes posted in woodworking groups this year came from someone who tried the angled tables first, found they put a slight bow in his boards, and went on to machine his own roller height adjustment instead.
So you have not eliminated the error. You have spread it over the full length of the board, where it is harder to see and harder to fix.
The full length bed, and why the reports on it contradict each other
The other common recommendation is a full length bed: a single piece of MDF or melamine running the whole way through, under the board, instead of adjusting the tables at all.
Some owners call it the single best thing they ever did to the machine. Others install one, measure, and find almost nothing changed. Both are telling the truth, because the bed is doing two different jobs and how much you get out of it depends on which job your machine actually needed done.
If your planer has no extension tables
The base DW735 ships without the folding infeed and outfeed tables. The DW735X includes them. Plenty of machines are also run with the tables folded, removed, or sagging unnoticed.
Without them, the board hangs in the air at one end for most of the cut. Going in, the trailing end is unsupported, and its weight pivots the board about the infeed roller, raising the leading end inside the machine. Coming out, the leading end is unsupported, and the same thing happens in reverse about the outfeed roller, raising the trailing end into the cutterhead. The board is being tilted, by its own weight, at exactly the two moments where tilt turns into a depth error. On long or heavy stock this is a larger error than the roller load change ever produces, and it is the reason so many people learn to lift the end of the board by hand as it exits.
A long bed that runs past the machine on both ends, with the overhanging parts actually supported on a stand or a pair of rollers, removes that entirely. It is not really a bed in that case. It is a continuous set of extension tables that happens to pass under the cutterhead too.
That is the group reporting dramatic results, and they are not exaggerating.
If your planer has the tables
Here the bed is doing something smaller but still real. The three surfaces the board crosses, infeed table, bed casting, outfeed table, are three separate planes, and they fail to agree in two ways.
The first is static. The tables are adjustable, they get knocked, and the adjustment drifts. If they sit high or low relative to the bed, the board steps or rocks on the way through and you get a depth error at the transition.
The second is under load, which is the part most explanations leave out. The folding tables are sheet metal, cantilevered off the body and held by their adjusters. They deflect, each one independently, and how much they deflect changes as the weight of the board shifts across them. So even a set of tables you aligned perfectly on a static straightedge is not necessarily one plane while a nine foot plank is moving across it.
A continuous bed spanning all three turns those three planes into one that moves together. Worth being precise about what is happening: the bed is not stiffening the machine’s bed casting. That casting is supported along its length by the base already, and a loose sheet lying on it adds very little. The flex the bed is tying down is in the tables.
This is a worthwhile improvement, and it is a modest one. It is the group reporting that they measured before and after and found a thousandth or two.
What the bed never fixes
Neither version does anything about the load change at the rollers. The carriage still flexes when the board is held by one roller instead of two, and no amount of support under the board changes that. If your tables were already flat, your board was already supported, and you still have a clean step a few inches in from each end, the bed is not the answer and no bed will be.
What the bed costs you
You lose the thickness of the bed from your capacity, and your depth gauge and turret stops no longer read true, so every setting needs mental arithmetic. If you add sacrificial rails at the sides, you lose width as well, and owners report a 13 inch planer effectively becoming a 10 or 11 inch one.
The bed also has to stay flat to be worth anything, which is the detail that quietly sinks a lot of them. MDF moves with humidity and sags over an unsupported span. Melamine faced particleboard holds flatter and takes the wear better, and the people reporting good long term results are usually the ones who used it. Whatever you build it from, support the overhanging ends. A bed that droops off both sides of the machine has recreated the problem it was meant to solve.
What we would actually do
Support the board first. If your machine has no extension tables, get something under the overhang before you change anything else, whether that is the factory tables, a long bed, or a pair of roller stands set to height. This is the largest single error available to you and it costs nothing to rule out.
Then check that the tables are flat and aligned. Worth doing regardless of which camp you end up in, because a misaligned table is a real defect producing a real problem. Lay a reliable straightedge from the infeed table across the bed to the outfeed table with the head raised out of the way. Look for light under it. Adjust until the three surfaces read as one plane.
Then judge what is left. If the snipe is gone, your problem was support or alignment and you are done. Keep them flat.
If snipe remains, you are looking at the load change. At that point angling the tables is a legitimate option, as long as you accept the bow on long stock and are not doing work where that matters. Plenty of people make that trade happily.
If flat boards are the point of owning the planer, the trade is a poor one, and the thing to change is how much the load shifts at the handoff rather than how the board is presented to it.
Changing the load instead of the geometry
The load swing is driven by how deeply the rollers compress into the board. Press less deeply and the difference between the two-roller and one-roller states shrinks, so the carriage has less to flex through and the cutting plane stays put.
The DW735 ships with no way to set that depth, which is why so much of the advice around this machine involves working on everything except the rollers. Our post on roller adjustment covers why it is not adjustable from the factory and what it takes to change that, and our Planer Snipe Fix Kit adds the adjustment with a 30 day money back guarantee.
Your tables should still be flat either way.