DS-620

I was fully prepared to be shipping this unit back if it did not live up to expectations but it is staying with me. I’ve had a number of portable document scanners over the years with a varying degree of success with each. I did a great deal of research into this type of scanner prior to ordering which included the ScanSnap, Doxie, canon and Fujitsu equivalent models. I am a prolific archivist and detest paper so any paperwork given to me gets scanned in and stored electronically. With the MFD shortage brought on by covid I struggled to get a worthy replacement MFD for home with an ADF when the ADF on my Canon just wore out. Over the recent year my job has changed to that of a more flexible worker either from the Office, home or client sites so a portable unit that can be added to my office in a rucksack was the best fit. Anyway enough about my situation. This unit can scan to a machine over USB, Wi-Fi and via a memory card you insert into the back of the device. Whilst the memory card does not petrude it would be nice if there was a clip or cover over it to stop it from being accidentally ejected. This may after all contain sensitive information or the remains of sensitive information after deletion. Scanning to the memory card is OK and just OK. Each page is saved as a separate document, even when selected PDF and 2 Sided each side will be safed as a separate document and not combined. You just put another piece of paper in the feeder and it scans and saves. There I no method, that I have found documented to continue a scan to the memory card into one file. The scans require assembly into a single file after the fact in the included software. I use this feature only for documents of one page. Only when there is no other practicable choice do I use this for multipage scans as it is a bit of a ball ache. Quite why they didn’t make use of the “WStart/Stop” button is anyone’s guess. The Wi-Fi functionality is OK, it is a bit slow in my experience. There is also no “known” Wi-Fi settings listed on the device’s settings so it just remembers the previous network it is connected to. It would be useful it it retained the settings for a number of networks to allow it to move between home, work and Mi-Fi adapter without having to repair the thing by the WPS button each time. As you can tell I mostly use my device over USB, its plug and play and fast. The built-in blank page detection is brilliant and the Brother iPrint & Scan software really is very good. This has a continuation feature so you can just keep stuffing pages into the feeder and they become one document. Automatic page rotation is also a good feature that works well as does deskew. The ability to insert a few pages at once would be nice but it isn’t worth sacrificing the extra size needed to support this. As a portable unit it would have been nice if it included even a cloth carrying case to stop it from being marked in my bag but this is an extra purchase. On th front of the feeder there is a peper guide for the feeder of the slidy piece of plastic type but there is no resistance to moving it so it is pointless. I may well gluee mine in position at somepoint. Despite these shortcomings it works well, the scans are good and it chewed through a massive backlog of scanning in a short period of time and will be taking up its place in my Office in a rucksack.

I love this portable scanner - it's so easy to put in the enclosed carry bag and pop it in the laptop bag. It uses a micro USB that draws the power from your computer so no messing about with SD cards and Wifi networks. Easy install of driver software which allows you to choose file type (including multi page PDF), paper size and resolution. I've been using it for digitising old photos and office paperwork for decluttering. It's fast and is whizzing through piles of paper. Highly recommended compared to more expensive products.

It doesn't work with Passport. I couldn't find any reviews mentioning passport compatibility, so I bought it and gave it a try! It's easy to install and use, fast (2 seconds per page), and efficient. It doesn't make noise, and the scanner produces high-quality, excellent image results, but it lacks Bluetooth connectivity for smartphones. Overall a good choice for documents only.

I hate paperwork and hate huge scanners that take up valuable desk space, so I got this. I was purchasing a small property for my son and was bombarded with forms to fill in by the solicitor. So I got this. It took about 10 minutes to install on my Windows 10 laptop. I plugged in the scanner, it was detected by the Brother software. I put the paper face up on the desk and clicked scan. It quickly scanned the sheet, then I clicked add page. After 5 pages I clicked save to location, and breathed a sigh of relief. A few more documents and the whole job was done in about 15 minutes, and the scanner is stored away ready for the next set of documents to scan. For around £80 it was fab. Job done. Highly recommended.

I confess to being sceptical, having read a few reviews of this, but overall I've been impressed. The unit is highly portable. As another reviewer mentioned, there's no case (not even a cloth one) to protect it, which might be a detractor given its intended portability. I bought this as a cheap scanner to digitise a number of reports more quickly than using my existing (old) flatbed. Windows 11 recognised the device immediately, but I downloaded the software bundle from the Brother website in order to use the main scanning utility and update the firmware, the latter of which was quick and simple. I didn't install either the PaperPort software or Kofax Power PDF standard, the latter of which is only a free trial. Changing the scanning settings is really easy in the iPrint&Scan software, and creating a single document from multiple pages is straightforward having ticked the Continuous Scan option in the settings under Feed Control. Using this, it's a simple case of pushing the next page into the scanner after the last and the unit automatically pulls it in. Once you're done, hit Finish and the PDF save options appear. I scanned a 50 page (single sided) report, generating a single searchable PDF, in about 5 minutes. This is much quicker than the hour or so I'd anticipate it would take to do the same on my flatbed scanner. The quality of the document at 300x300 dpi was good; plenty sufficient for a document. Invariably a flatbed scanner (and one more modern than mine) would produce higher resolution images, which is possibly an advantage for scanning photos, but for quick and decent scans of documents and images this is perfect. I only have two "niggles" with this product: a) the paper guide slider moves very easily, which can make the paper feed in slightly crooked, although the de-skew function is good here, and with a little practice it didn't prove and issue. I used a small piece of blu tack just to hold it in place, which worked fine. b) the PDF creation software doesn't have a great compression algorithm. The 50 page PDF I created was 20mb. I ran it through ABBYY PDF editor and even on high quality it shrunk it down to around 4mb. Overall, I would recommend this product if you want a decent portable scanner that'll make digitising documents quick and easy. If you want high resolution scans of photos, you're going to want a flatbed.

Pro's: - Decent software with autosize function up to 300dpi. - Very fast scanning. - Brilliant for everyday paperwork. Con's: - Can only autosize images up to 300dpi, not the maximum resolution it supports of 600dpi. - Seems to pick up dirt easily when scanning photos, with streaks occasionally occurring. - Has a maximum document feed length of about 15inches/45cm. Can't continously feed scan. This is a brilliant little scanner for A4/Letter document scanning. It's quick and scans double sided to pdf as a multi-page document or individuals, or can be set to various image formats (jpg, tif, all the normal formats etc). It would be a brilliant addition for any office or mobile office that relies on paper documents. I did find an interesting design flaw though, in that the feed scanner gives up and errors out if it thinks it still has to scan more than a page and a half roughly. I had some receipts to scan, and one printed retail receipt was nearly twice the length of an A4 paper, and the scanner would not scan it at all on auto-paper size settings, probably because it was unable to automatically guess the paper size. It would be nice if the software could allow for continual page feeding for circumstances like this where your document is longer than normal. If you want to scan photos, beware that the auto document sizing functionality which is a brilliant feature, only does a maximum resolution of 300dpi. To use the scanner's maximum 600dpi resolution you would need to trim files yourself. I also found it dirties easily, resulting in having to clean the scanner and re-scan are too frequently. I scanned in a family album of about 100-odd photos and realised once I had finished, that every photo was streaked. Since then I now check every photo scan which is time consuming. The Brother scanning software appears to work well on Windows 10. My only criticism I can give to it so far is it creates a little notification popup after scanning that does not time out, so you manually have to dismiss it. If you've scanned in hundreds of files, be prepared to sit clicking dismiss for a few minutes. This is definitely a scanner more suited to general office use.

A lot of criticism from this scanner is the requirement to have to charge it via a PC, with the inability to charge via a regular cable into a plug socket. After some trial and error I have found this scanner can be charged from the wall using a Sony AC charger adapter, which is designed for the PS3. These adapters can be sourced online for around £15 and whilst not as streamlined as a simple USB cable into the wall, it’s not far off and makes life a bit more convenient than having to plug into a PC, if it’s something that is important to you. Should Brother have supplied something similar with the scanner? Well it would have been no bad thing... Much has been said of the scanner, so I wont repeat much of what has been said. The bonus feature for for me was 2 sided scanning which saves a bit of time and similar units at this price point and less do not offer this. A couple of reviews have mentioned that tatty paper with creases and folded corners can make for the feeding mechanism to suck the paper in at a slight angle which makes for a slightly wonky scan. If you feed it carefully it can largely be avoided. There are 3 media transmission options; tethered to a PC, send to micro SD card, send to wifi device (needs connecting to a wifi network broadcast by the scanner, not your home wifi). I’ve not tried tethered scan in but image capture works well via SD card and via wifi to app on phone. The scanner scans quick enough, the limitation on speed is having to manually feed additional sheets in. I can’t comment on battery life as I’ve not used it that extensively yet. My only observation is the battery light moves from green (fully charged, high charge) to orange (less charge) quite quickly. Now I have the Sony adapter I am less bothered.

Unless you have perfectly crisp sheets on paper every time this is a waste of time and money.