Raven Original Document Scanner

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Raven Original Document Scanner	A4	8.5 in. x 11.7 in.	Wi-Fi (2.4ghz), Ethernet	17	34	50 sheets	1500 sheets	Click for more info

The Raven Original is the first automatic document feeder scanner we will be covering. This scanner is one of our all-time favorites. And that’s because it has an easy to use interface and a giant touch screen together with the fact that it’s priced well, very reliable and has great customer reviews after 6 months of usage. The CIS sensor in the Raven scans at a high resolution of up to 600dpi.

It has Wireless connectivity and an Ethernet port so this is a wireless scanner and a network scanner. It’s not the fastest, because it only does 17 sheets per minute and 34 images per minute in duplex scan mode. That’s its weak point. You can run the Raven everyday for 1500 scans and it will handle it without problems, but not more. It has an automatic feeder tray in which you can stack 50 sheets, which should be fine for most office documents.

It’s quite a light scanner weighing just 6.1 lbs and a compact scanner as well. It comes with a bundle of scan correction features such as automatic cropping and automatic color detection that can switch between scan modes. It can also clean the background of your scans so that it looks as white as possible. The deskew function allows it to rotate your image even if it’s just skewed a bit. If you are working with fragile documents, you might want to use the manual feed mode where you can feed the documents one-by-one. It also has a preview LCD which gives it an advantage over the others. This is a scanner for macs and PCs with drivers for both.

The scanning software is also Cloud compatible, so it sends files to Google Drive but they also offer a cloud service called Raven Cloud at no cost.

Fujitsu fi-7160

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Fujitsu fi-7160	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	USB 3.0	60	120	80 sheets	4,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Fujitsu Fi-7160 is another automatic feed scanner and a favorite of ours.

It has a much higher quality sensor, a CCD one that scans at a really high resolution of 1200 dots per inch. Even though the size of the digital scans will be huge, it’s worth having it for certain applications where you need to see very small details in the scanned documents. However what we’ve noticed in our digitization lab tests is that there is no real improvement in OCR accuracy from 600 dpi to 1200 dpi as it mostly depends on the consistency with which the characters are printed.

Color laser printers and inkjet printers tend to print well and the accuracy with them is always over 99%. With old printing machines, it can go down to 95%.

The USB 3.0 connectivity allows you to scan to Windows PCs and Macs, unfortunately there is no wifi, this is a pure USB scanner and we think that’s a minus these days when you are used to everything just connecting seamlessly. It is the fastest desktop document scanner in this comparison table and the fast scan speeds are not its only advantage.

It’s the heaviest sheetfed scanner in this list at 9.2 lbs but it does pack a lot of features and specs for that weight. It uses an ultrasonic sensor to detect if it pulled more than one sheet of paper into the scanner. Here is the bundled scan software that you get with it: PaperStream IP, PaperStream Capture, ScanSnap Manager for fi Series, Scanner Central Admin Agent. The auto document feeder adf tray can stack up to 80 sheets. The auto feeding system also has a multifeed detection system with an ultrasonic sensor.

This automatic document scanner comes with a host of image correction features like being able to switch between scan modes (color or black & white), being able to rotate and crop your images for you automatically, detecting and removing blank pages and also streaks correction. It can separate documents automatically and has an easy to set up barcode scanner feature to read bar codes and to translate them into metadata.

Optical character recognition is included with this high-speed desktop document scanner software too, so you can create searchable PDFs and Word Documents out of your scanned images. The Fujitsu can automatically upload the scanned images to Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote. Fujitsu also provides drivers for Mac and PC on their website.

It is one of our favorite scanners with auto scanning system because it has proven itself to be extremely reliable over time.

Kodak Alaris S2040

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Kodak Alaris S2040	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	USB 3.1	40	80	80 sheets	5,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Kodak S2040 is the 3rd, butc certainly not least favorite automatic feed document scanner. It’s quite a fast scanner at 40 pages per minute and has a generous automatic document feeder ADF tray of 80 sheets. It has a USB 3.1 connection like most office products. Kodak recommend that you scan up to 5,000 sheets per day, which should be plenty even for the power user. It’s equipped with a CIS sensor with an optical resolution of 1200dpi, so it will make for a great photo and document scanner as well. In long document mode, the scanner will digitize documents up to 160 inches in length. The scan speed is 40 pages per minute and 80 images per minute in single pass duplex scan mode.

This duplex scanner uses TWAIN and ISIS drivers so it will be compatible with 3rd party scanning apps. As far as weight is concerned, it weighs 7.2 lbs, so not great not terrible. This color page scanner has multifeed detection integrated into it using an ultrasonic sensor, so the document feeder will only feed one paper at a time. The feed rollers will need to be replaced only after 250,000 sheets so you have plenty of document scanning ahead of you until they wear out.

Automatic color detection, rotation, cropping and blank page detection are included in the scanning software. It’s only missing streaks correction but the rest of the great image enhancement features are there. Like the Fujitsu it also has the capability to separate documents and read barcodes. Optical Character Recognition is built into the scanner and it will easily recognize the text and create searchable PDFs.

The device is energy star certified so it uses the minimal amount of power needed to operate.

HP Scanjet Pro 2000 S1

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
HP Scanjet Pro 2000 S1	A4	8.5 in. x 11.7 in.	Hi-Speed USB 2.0	30	60	50 sheets	2000 sheets	Click for more info

The HP ScanJet Pro 2000 S1 is the last A4 automatic document feed scanner that we will cover here with a 600 dots per inch CIS sensor and an automatic feed tray that can stack up to 50 sheets in it. The ADF tray is smaller than the one that the rest have (80 sheets). It uses Hi-Speed USB 2.0 to connect to Windows PCs and Macs. The feed rollers are not as reliable either as on the rest, they will only last 100,000 sheets. That’s plenty of scans too but the other ones do much better here.

In long document mode, this office document scanner is able to digitize extra long documents of up to 122 inches in length. It’s the lightest scanner in this list, weighing just 5.7 lbs. Automatic cropping is present on the scanner, so it will remove the blank space around your scan, it will automatically clean the background, correct the edges and deskew it. What it lacks is a manual feed mode where you can feed fragile documents into the sheet fed scanner. It doesn’t have automatic document separation either, so you will need to manually separate documents if you have multiple batches. Luckily this compact desktop scanner has OCR software so you can create searchable PDFs.

This is a document scanner for PC and Mac and HP has drivers for both available for download.

So which is the best automatic document feeder scanner to buy?

Our favourite is the Raven Original (Or better yet Pro) in terms of reliability, user experience, interface and customer satisfaction after 6 months. If we were to choose an alternative it would be the Fujitsu. If you are looking for a scanner with an auto photo feeder then you should have a look at the two photo scanners with feeders made by Epson: the epson fastfoto ff-640 automatic feed photo scanner and the epson fastfoto ff-680w wireless scanner. There are some ADF scanners missing from the list: the Brother ads-2700w, Canon imageformula r40, fujitsu scansnap ix1500 There are also some great portable scanners with adf: the brother ads-1700w wireless mobile scanner, epson workforce es-400 color duplex document scanner, epson workforce es-300w portable wireless scanner, fujitsu scansnap s1300i mobile computer scanner, vupoint st-470 magic wand portable scanner with autofeed docking station. We also review flatbed scanners on our website like The Epson V39 or Canon CanoScan Lide 400. You can find any of these scanners on Amazon, B&H or Best Buy and these are the three stores we recommend.