Motivation
We are using our Canon MG5350 some time now. For the (very) accidental print, and for digitizing our documents. The printer works fine, even printing from our tablets without problems. But scanning of larger volumes is becoming a pain. You have to place each document carefully and the workflow using Filecenter is a labour intensive, time consuming effort.
Time to find an affordable, fast and reliable way to digitize.
Requirements
- We really need an ADF: Auto Document Feeder
- Small footprint on our desk
- Duplex scanning (in 1 go) is bonus
- Affordable
- Good interfacing and drivers. At least TWAIN and ISIS. And maybe WIA.
Candidates
HP Scanjet Pro 3000 s2 (mfg)
An excellent scanner according to PCmag (review). Affordable at € 228 at Bol.com.. But the review is from 2013, so the model is ancient. The s4 model is way more expensive at € 549 at Kijkshop.
Brother ADS 1200 (mfg)
This Brother has an even smaller footprint, and is highly recommended (Bestbuy reviews). Found it at Bol.com for € 239. It ticks all the requirement boxes.
Xerox Duplex Combo Scanner (mfg)
Impressive performance and sleek interface. But more expensive in Europe than in the States (€ 285 at Centralpoint), and not really a small footprint… Excellent according to a PC magazine review.
And it’s a great choice so far! Since purchase I’ve used it to scan and throw away 10 inch of paper history… I like the Paperport software, although it feels quite outdated. Can’t even handle another root folder like my Q:\… But it can and will perform a duplex ADF feed with the Brother ADS-1200 scanner, remove blank pages, adjust direction and alignment, OCR the contents and save it as a searchable PDF file.
Paperport 14 is too old. Requests to Brother for an update on this software gives no result: They point to Nuance for support. Brother, it’s cheap to include 9 year old software that hardly works on Windows 10. For instance: Just the display of the current folder’s contents (list or detail) takes forever on a fast i7 system.