Brother ADS-3300W Wireless High-Speed Desktop Scanner Review

Think we’ve reviewed Brother desktop document scanners a lot lately? You wouldn’t expect it: The company recently released five paper models: the ADS-4300N, ADS-4700W, and ADS-4900W, which won Editors’ Choice among high-volume network scanners. Today’s introduction, the ADS-3300W Wireless High-Speed ​​Desktop Scanner ($369.99), costs $20 more than the ADS-4300N and is slightly less powerful, but it has a touch screen instead of a bare button control panel. It’s a great document scanner, but the ADS-3300W isn’t enough to replace the Epson RapidReceipt RR-600W and the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600, our favorite entry-to-mid-range desktop scanners for home offices or small offices and workspaces. .

Another first-rate desktop document scanner

As I said, the ADS-3300W is the fourth in Brother’s line of new scanners, below the three previously reviewed ADS-4000 series models and above the ADS-3100 waiting in the wings. Measuring 7.5 by 11.7 by 8.5 inches (HWD) with trays closed and weighing 6.3 pounds, it’s about the same size as other document scanners in its class, and it has three times the desk space in the same slot. and outlet shelves are open for business.

Apart from the aforementioned Fujitsu and Epson, other similar competitors include the HP ScanJet Pro N4000 snw1 and the Raven Original Document Scanner. The latter weighs a few pounds thanks to its 8-inch, tablet-like control panel.

The 2.8-inch touchscreen allows you to scan and adjust from the front of the device. (Credit: Brother)

Brother’s control panel combines three buttons – Back, Home and Cancel – with a 2.8-inch color touch screen. Here you can choose from a list of pre-configured workflow profiles. (You can manage your profile with the ScanEssentials software included in the downloadable package; more on that in a minute.) Only the Brother ADS-3100 and ADS-4300W don’t have touchscreens; RapidReceipt and ScanSnap have 4.3-inch panels compared to the Raven’s 8-inch panel.

Scan directly using the ADS-3300W’s control panel, or choose from workflow shortcuts that combine single or double-sided (simplex or duplex) scanning, destination, output location, resolution, and more. . The maximum optical resolution of the scanner is 600dpi (1200dpi interpolated); Like its siblings, it supports document sizes from 2 inches square to 8.5 inches wide and 16.4 feet long. Color depth is 24 bits and grayscale is 8 bits.

You can scan to a single or multiple destinations, including cloud sites, email, FTP, local browsers, social media sites, and more. Access to Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, and SharePoint Online is built in, and it’s easy to add other sites. Supported output formats include image, searchable, secure, and signed PDF; single and multi-page TIFF; BMP; plain text; and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Inside the box is a setup guide, various sheets, a USB 3.0 cable, and a wired AC adapter. Please download ScanEssentials and other software from Brother’s support site.

The scanner comes with a setup guide, a USB 3.0 cable, and a power adapter. (Credit: Brother)

When it comes to handling your originals, the ADS-3300W’s automatic document feeder (ADF) has a 60-sheet capacity and a maximum daily duty cycle of 6,000 scans. The ADS-4300N and ADS-4700W have the same duty cycle but have an 80-sheet ADF, while the flagship ADS-4900W has a 100-sheet capacity and can handle 9,000 scans. By comparison, the Fujitsu, Raven, and HP scanners all have 50-page ADFs, while the Epson has a 100-page ADF. HP, Epson, and Raven models can do 4,000 scans per day, while Fujitsu can do 6,000 scans.

Connect to and use the ADS-3300W

Brother’s built-in interfaces include USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 compatible), Ethernet and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. This model can also scan to flash drives and other USB storage devices via a port on the back of the scanner.

Rear connectivity includes USB and Ethernet (as well as Wi-Fi), as well as a port for USB thumb drives. (Credit: Brother)

In addition to Wi-Fi, mobile connectivity includes Apple AirPrint and Brother Mobile Connect, as well as several cloud and social media sites. The downloadable software suite consists of Brother iPrint&Scan Desktop for Windows and Mac, Brother ScanEssentials Lite, and Kofax PaperPort SE with OCR for Windows.

Brother’s iPrint&Scan is a scanning interface and document archiving software. (Credit: Brother)

The first is used by both Brother’s stand-alone scanners and its integrated printers, and does exactly what its name suggests: It acts as a scanner interface for digitizing hard-copy data and converting it to one of several formats. This can include images or searchable PDFs, or Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

ScanEssentials Lite is a stripped down version of Brother’s original ScanEssentials software. (Credit: Brother)

ScanEssentials Lite is, as you might expect, a stripped-down version of ScanEssentials, Brother’s full-featured scanning interface and document archiving software. Kofax PaperPort integrates with scanners from many manufacturers and provides a scanning interface and document archiving front-end with features such as optical character recognition (OCR), keyword and phrase databases, systematic file naming, and directory structure.

Brother also provides a few third-party drivers, including ISIS, Sane, TWAIN, and WIA, that allow you to connect to any of the many applications that support direct scanning (such as Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Microsoft Office). .

ADS-3300W test: Rated speed and industry standard accuracy

The Brother ADS-3300W’s scanning speed is rated at 40 single-sided (plain) pages per minute (ppm) and 80 double-sided (duplex) images (ipm, counting each side of the page as an image). All the other scanners listed here share these ratings, with the Epson RR-600W at 35ppm and 70ipm.

I ran my tests using iPrint&Scan via USB on an Intel Core i5 test PC running Windows 10 Pro. First, I used the ADS-3300W and its software to scan single- and double-sided 25-page text documents before saving them to PDF files. With speeds of 43.9ppm and 84.3ipm, the ADS-3300W not only beats the mark, it’s above average, beating out the lower-rated Epsons.

I then timed the scanner to convert my double-sided 25-page document to a more versatile, searchable PDF format. It completed the task in 37 seconds, which was one of the slowest of the group, but in most cases it finished by only two or three seconds. The Brother ADS-4900W was the only impressive one at 24 seconds.

Today’s computers do a lot of things very well and very accurately, but it wasn’t always like that – there was a time when optical character recognition was more than a rough edge. But as I’ve noted in other reviews, OCR has matured in recent years to almost 100% accuracy if the documents you scan are legible enough and in the right format. Like most document scanners we’ve sampled recently, the Brother ADS-3300W read our Arial (sans-serif) and Times New Roman (serif) pages up to size 6 flawlessly. A few friends, including Raven Original, have managed flawless results of up to 5 points with one font or another, but the margin of 1 point is small. So is the likelihood that you will encounter a stack of documents with less than 9 or 10 points of text in real life.

I also scanned a few sets of business cards into Presto BizCard and a few receipts and invoices into BR-Receipts, with predictably good results. As always, BizCard does a great job of populating the correct fields in the database with contact information, given the cards don’t have a lot of padding, shading, or fancy fonts. BR-Document performed well when provided with relatively clean originals with legible text and numbers; You may need to do a bit of configuration to meet your needs, but the program’s learning curve is fairly shallow.

Want an entry-level or intermediate document scanner? Throw a dart at the list

If you need a high-volume scanner, you might want to consider the Editors’ Choice award-winning Brother ADS-4900W or the slightly less rugged ADS-4700W. But if your needs are no more than moderate, you have plenty of options, and most of them are great. The ADS-3300W is a first-class document management platform; It can’t match the 4.5-star ratings of the Epson RR-600W and Fujitsu iX1600, but it’s certainly a worthy alternative.