The bottom of the list of pecking order Brother’s latest release of a series of Desktop scanners for documents ADS-3100 High-Speed Desktop Scanner ($329.99) is fairly speedy and very accurate. It’s listed for around $40 less than its following model, the ADS-3300W however, you’ll give much to save money in terms of connectivity to networks as well as an on-screen control panel and support for smartphones as well as various handhelds, just to include a handful of convenience and productivity functions. This doesn’t mean that small or home-based offices which plug the ADS-3100 into the device’s USB connection (or scanning directly onto the USB flash drive, solid-state or hard disk) will not benefit from the scanner. The competition among mid- and entry-level scanners for documents is intense however, if your company does not require wireless or network scanning and scanning, this Brother model is sure to be able to meet your needs.
Easy to Use, Simply the Basics
ADS-3100 ADS-3100 is the final of five sheetfed scanners for documents from Brother to make it to our bench of tests. Its ADS-4900W is the flagship model with the highest volume (and Editors’ Choice winner) as well as the mid-range ADS-4700W, ADS-4300N ADS-3300W and ADS-4300N are superb also. They’re all the same dimensions. The five Brothers are 7.5 by 11.7 by 8.5 inches (HWD) when their paper tray closed. As with the majority of scanners in this class They double or even triple the size of their desktops with tray extensions for use. They weight between 6.2 between 6.2 and 6.5 pounds for each.
This scanner has far too many direct competitions to mention on this page, but we’ll mention only four of the most important ones that include it’s the Fujitsu ScanSnap IX1400 and the Epson WorkForce ES-400 II as well as the Raven Select Document Scanner as well as the Canon imageFormula R50 Office Docment Scanner. The ADS-3100 does not meet the standards of other scanners due to the absence of a touchscreen that is color. The control panel only has four buttons (Power Stop/Cancel to USB Scan for PC) along with a handful of indicator LEDs. The ADS-4300N and this are the only devices in the latest Brother quartet that do not have touchscreens.
It is possible to scan to various PDF formats (high-compression images, image searchable, secure or signed) and also PDF/A, single and multiple-page TIFFs, BMP, plain text as well as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. The maximum resolution of the scanner has a maximum of 600 dots per inch (1,200dpi interpolated) and allows document sizes of 2 inches square up to 8.5 inches in width and 16.4 feet long. The scanner supports the ability to colorize at 24-bit depth.
Online scanning options include social media and cloud websites as well as FTP sites, aswell locally-hosted drive and mail. It’s easy to get access to the majority of cloud and social media sites but the ADS-3100 can be configured to work with Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, Box, Dropbox, OneNote, SharePoint Online and Expensify.
Verdict: An Ideal Personal or Home-Office Scanner
If you’re able to live without mobile or networked scanning The Brother ADS-3100 could be for you, particularly in the event that you have plenty of photographs to save (though the ADS-3100 is more of an archive document scanner than the photo scanner). It doesn’t have connectivity to wireless networks or Ethernet connectivity It’s more of a personal device with a relatively small volume of scanning about 100-200 per day. (You’d have to fill up its 60-sheet ADF 100 times each day which is 14 times an hour to hit its 6,000-scan capacity.) Under the right conditions, though, the ADS-3100 is without question a fine entry-level-to-midrange document scanner.
