The attached video is just me scanning some receipts. It's not a review, and it's not very good quality.
This scanner is as good as it gets for going paperless via the cloud, although I still feel like the built-in software doesn't exactly cater to that workflow.
It's basically a better version of Brother's 2013 models which allowed scanning to the cloud without a PC attached. It has a decent interface. The screen isn't capacitive, but it's much less squishy than the older models.
You can create many shortcuts for whatever you want to do. For example, I have shortcuts for scanning to Google Drive in multi-page 300 dpi PDF, in 300 dpi individual JPGs, and in 600 dpi low-compression JPG. Individual shortcuts can set the destination, document type, resolution, duplex on or off, de-skew on or off, compression level, and blank page detection.
If all you do is use shortcuts, you can make the Shortcuts screen your Home screen, but it's not exactly intuitively obvious. You go to:
Settings > General Setup > Screen Settings > Home Screen
The two minor annoyances I have with it are:
(1) You have to wait a couple seconds and then press OK after you use a shortcut.
(2) The scanner does not have the ability to scan multiple items unless they can be stacked in the feeder tray. If you have a bunch of receipts to scan it's a little tedious if you don't want to try your luck stacking them all up.
When it scans all the documents in the feeder it immediately exits scanning mode and starts to upload. It sure would be nice if it would wait a second or two for you to add another document to the feeder so that you could easily scan several single-page items or receipts without needing to go through the whole process for every page.
That said, these are pretty minor annoyances, and it actually does a pretty amazing job of scanning a big stack of semi-crumpled receipts of varying sizes.
You have to put documents in face-down with the top of the page feeding first. It can't auto-detect when you put stuff in the wrong way. But I don't think this is a big deal having to know which direction to feed documents.
It's also really nice that it detects when you put a document in the feeder and comes out of sleep mode. This is a huge improvement from my last Brother all-in-one where I had to poke a button to wake it up, press the Shortcut button to go to the list of shortcuts, press the actual shortcut, and press OK a couple times.
Setup is pretty simple. You turn it on. You tell it which Wi-Fi network to use (it does not support 5 GHz). You enter your password. Then if you want to use a cloud service it tells you to use a browser to go to bwc.brother.com and give it access. You can revoke access later in Google Drive settings under Manage Appas. I assume Dropbox and Evernote are similar.
For me the most amazing thing is that it is 2016 and Brother is still the only company making scanners that don't need to be tethered to a PC or other device. The scanners that you can tether to a phone are ridiculous — you usually need to install some terrible app to manage the scans on your phone, and it connects via an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection.
This scanner works the way I would expect any good scanner to work.
I'm a developer and I've used strictly Linux on my home PC for the past four years. The only real annoyance for me has been trying to find a good scanner that doesn't depend on you using a Windows or Mac machine to manage all your scans. Finally I have something decent.
Hands down the best money I've ever spent. I've always wanted one of these. It's used daily.
I use it to scan docs to a QNAP NAS, no PC needed whatsoever. Drop the doc in and it scans to pdf and writes out to NAS
at specific location and then use QSIRCH on qnap to index.
PROS
Scan directly to dropbox, gdrive, onedrive, box, NAS/network locations or emailed
web based interface from PC, Touch screen on the device.
OCR, searchable PDFs
multiple shortcuts can be added, one touch shortcuts allow you to hit one button and go.
Fast scans - Both sides of document scanned at once.
Was able to scan anything from a business card to 8 1/2 x whatever pages
Software isn't bloat and mostly useful
blank page detection
CONS
PC free OCR is done via brother servers. Upload to brother, ocr then handed off from there.- some security risks here.
because of the above behavior, OCR'd documents cannot be sent to network location but rather have to go to Dropbox/etc or be emailed to you. Then sorted through to get into the right places.
Repeat. . . .not a photo scanner
Very touchy jam mechanism, some things simply cannot be scanned without snagging once or twice.
I'm not writing reviews more than once or twice/year, but this time I really feel like I have to. I'm a long time Linux user. While I do own a Mac, it's a laptop and it's for the road only and there's no way I'm going to plug a USB cable into a scanner at home. All boxes in the home run Linux.
So drivers have been a nightmare most of my life. I don't buy devices I can't run. I'm not a pedant, we really just don't have a Windows box here. So as you can imagine, a great deal of research goes into making sure the few devices I do own work with a Linux box, standard formats, or stand on their own. If you're one of us, you understand. I'm also at a stage of life where I just don't have the time to fiddle with my computers too much anymore-I'd rather be doing something else than to download and update poorly written open source drivers for commercial things I need.
So basically, I was looking for a scanner that I will use for a long time, that is, at minimum:
- Scans to a regular USB key
- Does not require a computer to operate
- Can produce PDFs directly, without software
- Is fast enough to scan away 100's of pages of documents
I hesitated for a very long time between getting the Brother ADS-2700W or the ADS-2800W. I simply couldn't ascertain whether the smaller 2700W was able to operate on its own, and could be configured on the network via an HTTP interface (again, no drivers). It seems like the cheaper little cousin of the 2800W. They've made an HTML manual only. The 2800W and its family look the same, and they're sold under the umbrella of "small business", they look more serious. Anyhow, not being sure, I bought the 2800W.
So this 2800W arrived in the mail today. In less than 5 minutes, I did the following:
- Unpacked and plugged in
- Turned it on, did not configure anything
- Plugged a USB key into it
- Put a 3 page document into it
- Selected "Scan to USB" from the top-level menu
- Put a document into it and pressed its "Start" button.
- Moved the USB key over to my computer
- Witnessed on my computer (no drivers) a beautiful 300dpi PDF scan of all my pages, both sides and perfectly aligned.
It works.
I'm really quite satisfied already.
This is a very basic review, but I know for sure there are others like me looking for a standalone device, and here I confirm this is one.
The Brother ImageCenter ADS-2800W is a good, reliable wireless scanner with a few minor drawbacks. I have now been using the printer for several weeks with a reasonably consistent and significant scanning workload each week. For clarifications on my environment:
- I am using this device on my iMac Retina 5K late 2014 model running macOS High Sierra
- I am using the latest available version of Brother's scanning software, Brother iPrint and Scan (27-Oct-2017)
- I have updated the scanner's firmware to the latest version (01-Feb-2018)
Here is my feedback from my use experience:
PROS
1) Fast -- for the first seven pages
2) Excellent output quality
3) Software is reasonably modern and simple to use
4) Wireless (Wi-Fi) scanning is flawless
5) Exporting documents into other applications is pretty straightforward
6) Works on a wide variety of source documents for scanning
7) Scanner is PARTICULARLY good at scanning VERY LONG paper items/receipts
CONS
A) After seven pages, the scanner slows down SIGNIFICANTLY
B) Scanner cannot be used to scan directly into software like Acrobat, Office, etc. (*)
C) Scanner software (Brother iPrint and Scan) is not entirely stable
D) TWAIN drivers do not report as visible/available to other software (see B, above)
E) With thermal paper source documents (receipts, charge slips, etc.), you will need to hold them down in the input tray and push them slightly into the scanner for the rollers to pick up the documents
If it were up to me (and it isn't), I would say this scanner is $100 more expensive than it should be, but I cannot deny the overall positive experience I've had with the scanner.
About the pros and cons:
1/A) Pro #1 and Con #A are what I consider the biggest selling point AND disappointment combined. It is nice that the scanner has a document feeding area where you could stack up to 50 pages in it and let the scanner work its way through all the document pages. For the first seven pages, watching those pages scream through the scanner gives you hope that your scanning job will be done quickly. Then, as soon as page eight slides into the scanner, I am instantly transported back to the days of the first inkjet printers where the heads made a (slow) pass across the paper, the printer then advanced the paper feed about 1/4", then the heads passed across in the other direction, then another advance, and so on. Starting with page eight, it literally took almost 45 seconds per page (dual sided, but still) for each page to be scanned. It didn't matter if the pages were all black and white text or color photos or anything in between. And this behavior always starts with page eight. Never earlier, never later. It got to the point where I broke out long documents into seven-page clusters and let each one feed through and complete, then added seven more pages to the scan. That was ultimately far faster than leaving the whole 50 pages in the hopper and letting it grind through. I understand that, probably due to the design of both the scanner and the scanning software, the scanner is buffering the scanned pages (again, both sides) at a resolution of 300x300, and only after the scan is complete will it let the scanning software (Brother's iPrint and Scan app) generate the scanned pages. Great for a few sheets, a very poor model for larger documents (which this scanner is specifically positioned as being good for).
2) Excellent output quality. Not more more I need to say here.
3) Modern, easy to use software. Having seen the Fujitsu ScanSnap software and some other packages, the Brother iPrint and Scan software is actually a pretty good software package. I just wish all of these scanner manufacturers would stop reinventing the wheel and let professional software companies like Adobe do their thing instead. But the Brother software is clean, simple, and functional.
4) WiFi scanning works really well. Fast and efficient and I've never had to doubt if the wireless scanning part was working or not. No pauses, no surreptitious/sudden/unexpected disconnect messages.
5) While the scanner WILL NOT be visible to Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office apps (at least not on the Mac), they do give you an option to take the scanned image and "send" it to an app of your choice (basically open the app with the scanned content already present). If they can do that, though, why not take the last step and let Adobe capture it directly from the scanner? Makes no sense, but at least this "send to" function works as I would expect.
6/E) Does work on a variety of source material, from the thin thermal receipts from gas stations, grocery stores, and charge slips, to large multi-page letter and legal documents. I have noticed, however, that scanning those thermal receipts requires a small bit of extra effort. Even though they are slotted in the input tray (automatic document feeder) and the scanner beeps to acknowledge that something has been inserted, the scanner will/does not pick those receipts up; the rollers will spin until the scanner gives up and declares there to be a document jam (there isn't one). The way around this is to apply a minor amount of fingertip pressure against the thermal paper by pushing down and in towards the scanner. Doing this will have the scanner pick up the thermal paper every time.
B/D) As mentioned previously, this scanner WILL NOT allow you to use the native scanning functions built into Acrobat, Microsoft Office apps, or other apps that would normally allow you to access a scanner to bring scanned content into your current working document. There are TWAIN drivers for this scanner, I have installed them, rebooted, and checked with my apps that support TWAIN, but they do not see this scanner. There are no WIA drivers either. For the money that this scanner costs, there is absolutely ZERO reason why they (Brother) cannot/should not make this happen. They just plain simple choose not to allow this.
C) On multiple occasions, the scanning software (Brother iPrint and Scan) has crashed for no apparent reason. These crashes are random in that they are not tied to a page count; sometimes it will crash after two pages, sometimes it will take 30 or more in a session, and some times not at all. I am noticing that these crashes are occurring less and less, though without any software updates, I am unclear as to why they are not happening as often.
7) I have successfully scanned very lengthy retail receipts from various locations (Bed, Bath & Beyond, Costco, etc.) with no issue. I do need to change some of the settings to allow for a long, narrow paper source prior to scanning them, but they always scan correctly when I do this. This has been a marvelous thing to be able to scan long documents and paper longer than U.S. Legal.
My wife and I bought this to replace the scanner that was on one of those cheap little all-in-one deals. You know the kind: It has a scanner on the top that accepts a single (one-sided) page at a time and really works best for scanning photos ... not documents. It died, and so we started shopping for a replacement.
See, the problem is that we scan a _LOT_ of documents. We homeschool our (three) children and I'm a big IT Geek (a programmer) meaning I like having all of my paper documents backed up on my (very nice, and very expensive) server.
Scanning has always been a real pain and a chore for us. One side of one sheet of paper at a time. Moreover, we had to drag out a USB Key so that we could scan each document to it, then move that to one of our PCs so that we could pull the document off of the USB Key and move it onto the server. A real chore that was super time consuming because of all of the manual intervention involved.
This scanner has absolutely everything that I wanted:
1. It is WiFi Capable (and offers manual configuration instead of only WPS - this is a real gem, as I don't use a store-bought router, and my Ubiquiti Access Point absolutely does not offer WPS WiFi configuration!).
2. It can scan directly to a Network Share. Oh sweet loving heavens, I cannot tell you how much time this single feature alone has saved me in moving files off of USB Drives and onto my Network Drives.
3. It is lightning fast. Seriously, with it's other features I can just turn the scan on and walk away - which is amazing - but this sucker is so fast that ... well, you'll see.
4. It just works. Very - very - minimal setup even for me, and I'm betting my setup is far more advanced than your average user. I set up multiple profiles for one-button scanning of different document types. It will save them automatically to the correct network drive based on the profile for all of our document types based on just one button. Default settings for how it scans and saves each page are configured, and I can modify them prior to initiating a scan job easily and intuitively.
Let me give you the best example that I can of how wonderful this little machine is. Among all of our homeschool <stuff>, we have text books, answer books ... and test books. I used our History test book as a trial case: It had 60ish (double-sided) pages, wherein each page equaled a single test (small test, kind of stuff we hand out weekly to the kids). The settings I used were to scan each double-sided page as an individual PDF document (so we'd have one PDF for each page - or roughly 120 PDFs at the end) and save them all to the predetermined network drive.
With our previous scanner, we could scan 5-10 pages before it would just start crapping out on us and telling us the USB Drive was full (it wasn't). And it would take ages.
I sat the entire 60ish pages into the scanner, hit a couple of buttons, and somewhere around 60 seconds later (I didn't actually time it, I didn't think to) it was done. No muss, no fuss, and I now have 115 PDFs in my network share ready for use.
It ain't cheap, but we will absolutely get our money's worth out of this thing. If you are looking to scan documents (not pictures), scan a lot of them, not have to hassle with configuration, setup, fiddling with USB Keys all the time, and for the thing to just work no matter what you throw at it ... then this little guy will do the job.
Cannot stress enough how happy I am with this thing.
Feature Product
- FAST SCANNING: Scan single and double-sided materials in a single pass, in both black-and-white and color, at speeds of up to 40 pages per minute
- MULTI-PAGE SCANNING FEATURES: Select 2-in-1 mode to capture 11″ × 17″ documents or continuous scan mode to scan unlimited pages into a single file
- FLEXIBLE MEDIA HANDLING: Scan photos, documents, receipts, embossed plastic cards, business cards, and more in color and black and white
- DIRECT SCANNING VIA WIRELESS: The wireless networking with Web Connect allows direct scanning to cloud applications, including Google Drive and more
- Operating system compatibility is windows xp 32-bit only, windows vista, windows 7, windows 8, windows 8.1, windows 10, mac OS X v10.8.x and up and linux
- OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SUPPORT: Includes a one-year limited warranty and free phone, online and chat technical support for the life of the product
Description
"The Brother ImageCenter ADS-2800W Desktop Scanner is a dependable office scanner with lightning-quick scanning capability that doesn’t compromise on quality. A perfect office solution for mid-sized to large businesses, the ADS-2800w simplifies the way your documents are captured, processed, managed and delivered. This scanner offers both wireless and wired gigabit Ethernet connectivity, Wi-Fi direct, and high-speed USB 2.0 for local connections. The Web Connect feature allows you to scan to a wide variety of destinations, including cloud-based applications like Google Drive Evernote, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneNote and OneDrive.
This office scanner delivers incredibly fast scanning. Scan single and double-sided materials in a single pass, in both black-and-white and color, at speeds of up to 40 pages per minute. Precision scanning is not compromised, with resolutions of up to 600 × 600 dpi and 1200 × 1200 dpi interpolated. You can also select multiple-page scanning modes, including 2-in-1 mode for capturing 11″ × 17″ documents or continuous scan mode for scanning unlimited pages into a single file. Use the 50-sheet capacity auto document feeder for multiple-page scanning projects. Easily scan photos, documents, receipts, embossed plastic cards, business cards, and more. Scans documents of up to 8.5″ wide × 196″ long (in continual scan mode). The integrated image optimization also includes hole punch, background, and blank page removal.
The ImageCenter ADS-2800w is bundled with a valuable software suite that includes PDF editing, OCR, and desktop document management programs. It also provides a wide range of security features, including Secure Function Lock, SSL/TLS, Enterprise Security (802.1x), network user authentication, and corporate email address lookup via Active Directory (including LDAP). This product is Kofax VRS certified as an industry leader in image-processing software that automatically examines scanned materials and applies the appropriate correction settings for optimal results. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux and comes with a one-year limited warranty and lifetime phone technical support."
I purchased this Brother ADS-2800 scanner for my daughter as she and her husband have a business, but after 15-20 years she's running out of cabinet space, LOL. So, after receiving this scanner she setup her QNAP TS-469 Pro server to several different folder pertaining to their business and assigned them to the convenient buttons on her touch screen and away she went. After a month, she is about half way through. She also found an App on her QNAP server called 'Qfile' that allows her to load into her husbands phone. Now he can pull-up any job he's ever done for anyone. So, needless to say if she could give this Brother ADS-2800 scanner Six Stars, she would. The color 'touch screen' on the front panel is absolutely is a feature she loves and could not do without. Thanks Brother for a great product, and thanks to Amazon for their great service.
For the money, this has been a great purchase. The features are pretty decent, and operationally there have not been any problems. It gets daily use and I hear no complaints of feed jam problems. The touch screen is a little small, but definitely usable and legible. The web interface is probably the weakest part of the machine, but only in the fact that it's a bit spartan and setting up the scan-to-disk option is the typical 'janky' Brother interface. It works, but it's not terribly intuitive and if you are not an IT person, and may present some challenges for domain server based setups. This is typical of HP, Brother, etc., they all suck. If you are trying to get this feature to work with a Mac OS based computer, it may also prove difficult, but again, it's typical of this feature on virtually all manufacturers, not just Brother. For the money, it's a great buy. I paid around 400 for it on Amazon and relative to higher priced machines of 1500-2500 dollars, you can't go wrong. I could replace it 3-4 times for the cost of the next highest priced 'enterprise grade' machine. We do not use the desktop software that is available for this device, only the non-OS specific network scan functions.
Thanks Brother! Latest linux driver works perfectly with simple scan on Ubuntu. Less than one day installed, but so far, it does everything I expected. Setup of the Apps (gdrive, evernote, etc.) was a breeze and allows you to scan without connecting to pc.
Update:
Tip for scanning receipts: Scanning a flimsy receipt is not pleasant with this scanner. This isn't a knock on the scanner though. For the most part, the scanner will scan receipts fine, but its cumbersome to load long receipts in a scanner - especially if they are wrinkled. To be clear this is not a negative on this scanner, but just the dynamics of feeding a long, narrow and flimsy sheet of paper in the feeder. I'm sure the included carrier feed would circumvent this issue, but it requires and extra step which isn't practical for me.
In my effort to find the best cloud destination for my scanned items, I discovered the nuances between using google drive and evernote. Although both services scans receipts via the mobile phone app without issue, I narrowly decided google drive is much quicker at the initial capture. It appears google drive app on android does post processing which makes it faster at capturing the image than evernote. Conversely, evernote attempts to outline the receipt in real time, which requires you to have to wait for it to recognize the receipts border before capturing. Although this is impressively fast, most of the time it's still significantly slower than google drive scan solution, which is as quick at taking a photo.
The other benefit of using a mobile app to scan your receipts is that you can obviously scan the receipt as soon as you receive it (please don't do this in the checkout line though) vs having to wait until you get to your scanner. I'm loving this solution for receipts as it making going paperless that much more effortless.
Bought the ADS 2800W after a lengthy research. I needed a reasonably fast scanner that can be moved around and plugged into my network as a standalone device to digitize documents in file cabinets at different locations. It had to be reasonably fast and feed reliably multiple paper sources and formats, including receipts and biz card. Needed the scanner to upload to a folder on a Qnap NAS and have OCR automatically performed by a static Windows 10 workstation. The printer had to have TWAIN/WIA/ISIS drivers to run 3-party apps so that I am not at the mercy of a single vendor.
The final hardware-Software pairing was with Nuance Power PDF Advanced 3, which had the automatic OCR feature at a reasonable price. ABBYY Fine Reader Corporate does the same but costs 2-4 times more (depends on where you buy it), with relatively similar OCR accuracy. Since all OCR conversion to Searchable PDF is in the background by Power PDF, conversion speed was a non-issue especially on a i9-9900K CPU.
Idea is to do bulk scanning to different customized profiles so that I can set different file prefixes for different categories of documents (receipts, statements, invoices, manuals etc). Customization/configurations was done via web browser, very straight forward but took a while to find the default password, which is "initpass". The profile customization is very flexible, only thing missing is the ability to un-select the Multifeed Detection in the profile, which you may want for odd-ball paper or 2-1 scan using the plastic sleeve.
Scanning via the touch screen to Network into image PDF, the average speed is around 41-42ppm (82-84 ipm) @ 300 dpi color duplex medium file size. No lag between mix of double sided printed documents and single sided sheets. Time between pressing START and the roller feeding is about 1 sec, transmission at end of scan to NAS seems to be unnoticeable on a wired network as it is roughly done by the time I pull the papers from the out tray.
The Apps that came with the scanner I ended up uninstalling. Its OK for general use, just not for my specific application. Have to say Paperport's UI can benefit from some updating, looks really dated.
Printer came with K version firmware, updating to N version was simple.
Not much YouTube reviews on this scanner and spec is conflicting, with many places still listing it as 30ppm instead of 40ppm.
Overall, couldn't be happier and relieved by my choice to go with ADS 2800W. Very well made and great performance to my surprise, I was really hesitant to buy this unit (thus the lengthy research) as the price to feature+performance was a bit too good to be true, now I am a convert to Brother products. Works great for my specific needs although it was a hair over my budget. The best feature loaded and commercial grade performance scanner for the price.
Great job by the scanner design team @ Brother!
The headline pretty much sums this critter up completely. My wife has to scan things often for work. Add to that 35 years of tax returns and other things that are taking up space and you now know why I was leaning toward such a nice device.
Setup was pretty straightforward although not quite as intuitive as I would have hoped. There are combinations of options needed to create profiles. Not a big deal but I did forget how to do something a week after I set things up initially.
I have not tried some of the more advanced things yet but I have setup email and network (ftp to network attached storage device) and workstation deliveries. All work well.
Scan quality is excellent and at 300dpi the thing is blazingly fast.
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