It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a Brother scanner, though the company tells us that in addition to the mid- and high-volume ADS-4900W ($699.99) reviewed here today, we should be receiving four other review units soon . A direct competitor to two of our Editors’ Choice recipients, the Epson DS-790WN Wireless Network Color Document Scanner and the Raven Pro Document Scanner, the ADS-4900W is fast, accurate, and loaded of connectivity and other useful features, all for a competitive price.
Brother makes excellent business machines and their scanners hold up well in a crowded and highly competitive market. And that’s more than enough to make the ADS-4900W our favorite mid- and high-volume sheet-fed document scanner for offices, workgroups, and small and medium-sized businesses, not because of any features or ground-breaking breakthrough, but because this is a fantastic, rock-solid machine.
Fast, accurate, feature-rich and reliable
As I write this, the ADS-4900W is at the top of Brother’s sheetfed document scanner pecking order, above the soon-to-be-reviewed ADS-4700W and ADS-4300N and a bunch of smaller models in the ADS series, including the ADS-3100 and ADS. -3300W, which are also scheduled for review.
The ADS-4900W measures 9.2 by 11.6 by 7.0 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.8 pounds. As sheet-fed document scanners of this size, volume and capacity go, the ADS-4900W is mid-sized and a bit lighter than most of its competitors, and there are many, many more than what can we talk about here In addition to the Epson DS-790WN and Raven Pro mentioned above, other top contenders include the HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow 5000 s5 and ScanJet Pro N4000 snw1; the Fujitsu fi-8170 Color Duplex Document Scanner, another PCMag favorite; and the Canon imageFormula DR-M260, again, to name just a few.
Of the Brother ADS series machines mentioned above, only the ADS-4900W includes a 100-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for sending one- or two-sided originals to the scanning mechanism, just like the Raven Pro, the fi- 8170 and the DS-790WN. The ScanJet 5000 and DR-M260, on the other hand, come with 80-page ADFs, and the ScanJet N4000’s feeder holds a more modest 50 originals.
When not in use, like most sheet-fed document scanners, this one is about a third of its size in use.
Document scanners with sheets like this typically extend up to three times their duration when closed and out of service.
Among the many appeals of this brother is versatility. Not only does it offer the most connectivity options available, an excellent scanner interface, and other very useful software utilities, as you’ll see in a moment, but you also get a customizable 4-color touchscreen control panel .3 inches, shown below.
A large customizable 4.3-inch touch screen and three buttons (Back, Start and Cancel) make up the entire control panel.
The dashboard is customizable as users and departments can create and populate individual panels with their own sets of profiles and other shortcuts. These are indicated by the tabs at the bottom of the screen labeled “Basic 1”, “Custom 1”, etc. Tabs are, of course, like shortcuts, renamable. You can create up to 56 custom panels.
From here, you can set up and run scan jobs as needed, or you can select workflow profiles that contain all relevant information, including resolution, one- or two-sided scans (simplex or duplex), format output (such as image or searchable PDF). , Secure PDF, Signed PDF, PDF/A, High Compression PDF, TIFF, Multi-Page TIFF, BMP, TXT, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and scan destinations.
Destinations of course include local drives, cloud sites, social networking sites, FTP sites, email, and so on. While you should be able to connect to most cloud sites without issue, the ADS-4900W supports Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, OneDrive, OneNote, SharePoint Online, and Expensify.
The maximum resolution of the ADS-4900W is 1200 dpi. It supports document sizes ranging from 2 by 8.5 inches to a maximum of 8.5 inches wide by 16.4 feet long. Color depth is 24-bit external and 48-bit internal.
Inside the box is the ADS-4900W itself, several booklets and a setup guide, a USB cable, a power adapter, and a power cord. The software can be downloaded from the Brother support site.
The box contains the scanner itself, leaflets and a setup guide, a USB cable and a power adapter and a power cord.
In terms of volume, the daily duty cycle rating for this scanner is 9,000 scans. That’s bigger than most of the machines mentioned here so far, except for the fi-8170 (rated for 10,000 scans per day). Most others, except the Raven Pro (6,000 scans) and ScanJet N4000 (4,000 scans), are rated between 7,000 and 8,000 scans.
One connection for each device
Standard connectivity on the ADS-4900W consists of Ethernet, wireless Wi-Fi 802.11n (2.4GHz and 5GHz), connection to a single PC via USB 3.0, and Wi-Fi Direct (for connecting mobile devices to ‘scanner without him or them). be connected to the same router or network). In addition to Wi-Fi Direct, other mobile options include Apple AirPrint and Brother Mobile Connect.
Standard interfaces include Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, USB 3.0 and a USB port for scanning directly to memory devices.
For added security and convenience, you can scan directly to USB drives and other USB storage devices using a port on the back of the scanner, between the Ethernet and USB 3.0 ports, as shown in the image above.
In addition to Mobile Connect, the software package includes Brother ScanEssentials for Windows, Brother iPrint&Scan Desktop (Windows and Mac), Kofax PaperPort 14SE and Kofax Power PDF for Windows.
ScanEssentials is a basic scanner interface.
ScanEssentials, shown above, is just what it sounds like: a simple scanner interface that lets you create and modify basic workflows. iPrint&Scan is more of an all-in-one printer driver and interface than a stand-alone scanner utility, although it does have some useful features.
Kofax PaperPort is the most comprehensive solution here. Not only can you control your scanner with it, but it’s also a pretty robust document management application, complete with its own set of workflow profiles, automated naming conventions, optical character recognition (OCR) and more month. And, of course, Power PDF is what it sounds like: a PDF creation and editing utility similar to Adobe Acrobat DC. With its connectivity and software options, the ADS-4900W is a fantastic value.
ADS-4900W test: fast and accurate
Brother rates the ADS-4900W at 60 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 120 two-sided (duplex) images per minute, or ipm, where each side of the page counts as an image. Both the Canon DR-M260 and the Raven Pro have the same ratings; the Fujitsu fi-8170 is, at 70 ppm and 140 ipm, the best rated of this group; the HP ScanJet 5000, at 65 ppm and 130 ipm, comes in just behind that; the Epson DS-790WN has a speed of 45 ppm and 90 ipm; and finally, at 40 ppm and 80 ipm, the HP ScanJet N4000 is the slowest of this group.
I tested the ADS-4900W via a USB connection to our test PC, which has an Intel Core i5 and runs Windows 10 and ScanEssentials. (Note that I also did a few cursory test scans of some of the other included programs and got similar results.) The first test involved timing the scanner as it scanned our 25 sheets at a time. face and 25 two-sided sheets. text documents and converted and saved them as PDF files.
The Brother scanned, converted and saved one-sided documents at a speed of 61.2 ppm and two-sided pages at 124.4 ipm. Not only are these speeds slightly above Brother’s rating, they’re also among the fastest in this test group, with only the Fujitsu and ScanJet 5000 running noticeably faster. The speeds of the Raven Pro are about the same and the Canon is slightly slower. Both the HP N4000 and Epson scored significantly slower.
I then recorded the ADS-4900W as it scanned our 25-page two-sided text document and converted and saved it as the most versatile and easy-to-archive searchable PDF. This time, the Brother scanned and the software saved the document in about 25 seconds. That’s 1 second behind the Raven Pro, tied with the fi-8170, and faster than the others: it’s much faster than the DS-790WN and ScanJet N4000.
Scan without surprises
Compared to just a few years ago, document scanners have improved considerably in both reliability and OCR accuracy. Here, by reliability, I mean little or no jams, picking up more than one sheet at a time, mixing originals during output, tearing or damaging originals, etc. In other words, there are no physical hardware interruptions (which can be frustrating) during the actual scanning phase of the process: paper pages passing from the ADF, between the two contact image sensors (CIS) and they are ejected to the output tray.
As is the norm these days, the ADS-4900W’s smooth and reliable scanning mechanism gave me no grief, and the overall accuracy of the software, how well it turned our scanned text into editable text, was be flawless, with 5 points without errors in the Arial (sans-serif) and 6 points without errors in the Times New Roman (serif) portions of the test. As I’ve noted in previous reviews of scanners like these, though it’s possible to score slightly better in our font tests (both the Raven Pro and the Fujitsu fi-8170 dropped to a 5-point type no errors on both tests), you or your organization probably won’t find documents with such small type. The Canon DR-M260 tied the Brother in these tests, and all the others managed to meet the average standard of 6 points without errors in both tests.
The good news is that as long as your paper pages are in reasonably good condition and legible, this (and most other) scanners in this class, and their software, will deliver clean, error-free text. If you’ve ever had to go back and correct pages full of OCR conversion errors,…