Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-Speed Desktop Document Scanner - Review 2022

A smaller, lower-chapters, and less-expensive sibling to the Editors' Choice Brother ImageFormula ADS-3600W, the Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-Speed Desktop Document Scanner ($399.99) is a low- to-mid-volume document scanner designed for micro and small offices and workgroups. Comparable in toll and speed to the Epson WorkForce ES-500W, which, similar the Blood brother models mentioned hither, is networkable, the ADS-2700W is fast and highly accurate for the price. In addition, information technology comes with an easy-to-use color touch screen and the ability to scan to USB thumb drives, thereby making information technology an infrequent value, as well as our latest elevation pick for entry-level networkable document scanners.

Small Still Powerful

Measuring 7.0 by eleven.v by 5.7 inches (HWD) with its trays closed, and weighing 5.8 pounds, the Blood brother ADS-2700W is slightly smaller and lighter than its well-nigh straight competitor, the Epson ES-500W, equally well as the similarly priced Catechism imageFormula DR-C225, which comes in a wireless networkable iteration for an additional $150. The higher-capacity and costlier (nigh twice the price) aforementioned Blood brother ADS-3600W, on the other hand, is significantly larger and weighs almost twice every bit much as its smaller ADS-2700W sibling. When in service, these models' (and most others') input and output trays extend significantly, making them each about twice their original height and three times longer, but still small enough to sit comfortably on all simply the smallest desktops.

While nosotros're starting to come across more than networkable document scanners these days, compared with their non-networkable counterparts, there still aren't many available yet, especially at this price. Networking, of course, allows not just easier access for office or workgroup team members, but it also provides a wider range of workflow scenarios, such as scanning to dissimilar PCs on the network, or operating the scanner remotely. The Blood brother ADS-2700W (as well as its college-end ADS-3600W sibling) supports both Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking, as well as USB and Wi-Fi Straight, a peer-to-peer connection between your mobile device and the scanner without an intermediary network. The Epson ES-500W, on the other hand, does not back up Ethernet.

Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-speed Desktop Document Scanner Front

The ADS-2700W has a 50-sheet single-laissez passer duplexing (ii-sided) automatic document feeder (ADF) and it comes with a daily duty wheel rating of iii,000 pages. The ADF size is the same as the Epson ES-500W and the Brother ADS-3600W, but their duty cycle ratings are 1,000 and 3,000 more pages per day, respectively. Several closely priced simply not-networkable scanners, such every bit the Editors' Choice Xerox DocuMate 6440, for instance, have as big as lxxx-sail ADFs and loftier (6,000 sheets, in this instance) duty cycles.

Peradventure one of the more useful (and unusual, at this price point) features is its 2.viii-inch color touch screen, which provides extensive control over your scan jobs directly from the scanner itself. (The ADS-3600W has a 3.seven-inch touch screen, but, every bit mentioned, it costs a lot more the ADS-2700W.) Non just can you gear up and command your workflows from the scanner's control panel, you tin can besides configure and save profiles (Brother calls them "shortcuts") such as Save to USB, Ship to Email, Save to a Network Drive, so on. In other words, it's not necessary to create and manage your workflow profiles from a PC; you tin do so from the device itself.

In addition to the touch screen, the ADS-2700W's command panel consists of Home, Back, Browse to USB, Scan (browse to first shortcut, for ane-touch scanning), Abolish, and Power.

Mostly Easy Setup

The Brother ADS-2700W is small and light enough that getting it out of the box is uncomplicated. Different nearly desktop document scanners, where you fold the hat upward and it becomes your ADF, with the ADS-2700W the ADF comes detached and y'all connect it to the trunk of the scanner during setup. Other than that, there'south no assembly. My review unit didn't come with a disc in the box (like Epson, Brother has recently stopped including discs with its desktop scanners), but a elementary search consisting of the production name and the search term "commuter," got me to the software download page in two clicks. The only thing is that when I unzipped the download file, information technology extracted into an install-disc-like file construction and didn't start upward automatically.

Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-speed Desktop Document Scanner Control Panel

I had to go in to the file structure and showtime the installation program, which is fine, though information technology left me wondering how many would-be users would know how to first the installation manually. Otherwise, the process was short and effortless. In addition to the drivers, the software packet includes Nuance PaperPort 14SE, a pared downwardly version of the pop PaperPort document management program; there'southward a like program for Macs called PageManager, and NewSoft Presto! BizCard OCR, a business concern card scanning and management application. In addition to document direction, PaperPort (and PageManager) comes with a scanner frontend and a PDF viewer, cosmos, and editing utility—everything you demand to become the most from the scanner.

Missing, compared with the other Brother scanners I've looked at, is Brother's ControlCenter, a total-featured scanning utility and rudimentary document-direction program. However, nearly all the functions available in ControlCenter are accessible through the bear upon-screen control console, where I ready the profiles to perform my test workflow scenarios, such every bit scan ane-sided to image PDF, two-sided to epitome PDF, two-sided to searchable PDF, and so on.

Let 'er Rip

Typically (bated from the Xerox DocuMate 6440), nether-$500 document scanners aren't screamers, but the ADS-2700W's performance on our tests was impressive. Brother rates it at 35 simplex (one-sided) pages per minute (ppm) and 70 duplex (two-sided) images per minute (ipm, where each browse, or page side, is an image). (I tested over USB 2.0, setting up and initiating my scans on the ADS-2700W's control console. Scans were in turn handed off and candy via PaperPort on our standard Intel Core i5 testbed PC running Windows ten Professional.)

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Without the lag time (the time between when the last folio hits the output tray and the software subsequently saves the scanned pages to a usable format), while scanning our 25-folio text certificate, the ADS-2700W churned at 44.8ppm and 73.2ipm, well past its ratings. PaperPort converted and saved our scans to image PDF at the charge per unit of 33.7ppm and 69ipm—withal quite close to Brother's ratings. The Epson ES-500W performed roughly the same at 35.3ppm and 68.8ipm, and Brother'south higher-end sibling, the ADS-3600W (rated at 50ppm and 100ipm) soared at 46.2ppm and 96.8ipm. Catechism's DR-C225 (and the Wi-Fi-enabled DR-C225W) came in about 9ppm and 20ipm behind the ADS-2700W, and Xerox's 6440 churned at about 6ppm and 11ipm faster.

Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-speed Desktop Document Scanner Extended

When scanning and saving to the more versatile searchable PDF format, this Brother test unit candy our two-sided 25-sheet (l pages) text document in 50 seconds, 6 seconds slower than the Epson ES-500W, xiii seconds faster than the Xerox 6440, 22 seconds faster than the Canon DR-C225W, and the ADS-2700W came close to tying its (ii times) more-plush ADS-3600W sibling.

When Accuracy Counts

A scanner's speed is of import, but its optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy can be critical, especially if accuracy is low enough that y'all spend too much of your time correcting errors. OCR, of course, denotes the procedure of converting scanned text to searchable/editable text. Not simply is the Brother ADS-2700W accurate for a low-volume document scanner, it's i of the most accurate desktop scanners we've tested, including the much more than expensive networkable models, such as the four-to-five times costlier Catechism ImageFormula ScanFront 400.

The ADS-2700W scanned and converted our Arial test font page without errors downwardly to 5 points, which is quite good—though unreadable without magnification for many people—and it converted our Times New Roman test folio errorless down to 4 points, which we haven't seen at all for at least the past twelvemonth or and so. Past comparing, the Catechism ScanFront managed merely vi points for Arial and 8 points for Times New Roman. A closer competitor, the Epson ES-500W, managed merely 8 points for both fonts, and fifty-fifty the ADS-2700W's more powerful sibling, the ADS-3600W, was accurate without errors downward to only 6 points Arial and eight points Times New Roman.

I as well scanned a couple stacks of business cards into the BizCard software, and while the ADS-2700W seemed a little more authentic than other machines at this task, as with the other scanners I've tested, the deciding cistron was primarily the design of the individual cards themselves. Cards with color backgrounds, gradients, and other features in and effectually the important text fields, such as name, address, phone number, and such, typically played havoc with the recognition procedure.

Brother ADS-2700W Wireless High-speed Desktop Document Scanner At Work

Applying BizCard'due south various background and other dissonance filters helped to varying degrees, but sometimes simply typing in the data from the most ornate cards is the fastest method. In this, the information era, those companies and individuals that want their business organization cards to be the most effective might proceed in mind that having their cards digitized and remembered is preferable to just getting them noticed with a wink-over-substance design.

I Highly Effective Little Scanner

Frankly, given its proclivity for accuracy, its multi-facet connectivity and networking features, a highly useful touch-screen control panel with the ability to create and save profiles from the scanner itself, the Brother ADS-2700W Wireless Loftier-Speed Desktop Document Scanner is one impressive petty depression-to-mid-volume document scanner. It'southward as if Blood brother took everything I liked about the higher-stop top selection ADS-3600W and scaled it down to a highly efficient and easy-to-use lower-price, moderate-use networkable solution. Aside for, perhaps, a larger affect screen (this one's a bit cramped for finger navigation), at that place's very piddling to dislike nearly it, making the ADS-2700W our latest first choice for a low-to-moderate apply networkable certificate scanner for micro and small offices and workgroups.