BrotherDS-620 Document Scanner, Portable

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 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.