Brother has launched a new range of scanners for businesses whose scanning needs exceed the capabilities of a multifunction printer.
For many small businesses, a multifunction printer provides all the scanning capabilities needed. But if you do a lot of scanning, there may be advantages in buying a dedicated scanner.
One of those advantages is that most lower-end multifunctions can only do one job at a time, so while one person is scanning a few hundred pages, their colleagues are unable to print.
Another is that dedicated scanners – such as Brother's new ADS-2800W, ADS-3000N and ADS-3600W models – are likely to handle a wider variety of media via the automatic document feed (ADF).
Most multifunctions we've used struggle with anything significantly thicker than 70gsm paper, and the cheapest models may lack an ADF altogether. Thanks to a straight path, the Brother ADS scanners handle paper between 40 and 413gsm, plus plastic cards up to 1.4mm thick.
They also perform image processing (including edge clean-up, hole punch removal and de-speckle) for cleaner, more legible and smaller files. They can save scans to local destinations (file, SharePoint, Microsoft Office and so on) or to the cloud (Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and OneNote).
Other features include Near Field Communication (NFC) for ease of use with similarly-equipped mobile devices; multifeed detection to ensure every page in the ADF is scanned; USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi interfaces; and Windows, Mac and Linux compatibility.
Prices range from $899 to $1299.
