Raven Pro Document Scanner

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Raven Pro Document Scanner	A4	8.5 in. x 11.7 in.	Wi-Fi (2.4ghz), Ethernet	60	120	100 sheets	6000 sheets	Click for more info

The Raven Pro is to put it plain, one of the best color duplex document scanners every made. It’s an A4 scanner with a scanning area of 8.5 in. by 11.7 in. That works out roughly an A4 size. It’s equipped with an image sensor that can output an image quality of 600 dots per inch. For documents and photos that don’t require a super-high level of detail, it’s going to be more than enough.

For connecting the scanner to your PC and Mac you can use either the integrated Wireless connectivity or the Ethernet port, no usb cable needed. Wi-fi only works on a 2.4ghz band but it’s going to have decent speeds. It being a duplex scanner, it will scan double-sided documents at fast scan speeds of 60 pages per minute. So if you have 2-sided documents, that works out at 120 ipm. Duplex scanning is something that all the scanners listed here have, so it’s not exactly an advantage.

Raven recommends that you don’t scan more than 6000 sheets per day on it. This is similar to what other sheet fed scanners with ADF have. That’s about 2 full hours of it running non-stop. You’ll be going through 150,000 sheets before you need to consider replacing the feed rollers. So my guess, with a normal useage, it will be at least 2 years before you need to replace them.

You can stack 100 sheets in it’s Automatic Document Feeder tray and the entire scanner weighs just 9.2 lbs. This is a wireless compact scanner. All the intelligent image correction features are included with this desktop scanner: It will automatically crop your images so that they don’t have any black or white space around them and bring them to their real size. Automatic rotation will make your scanned documents always facing up. So if your image is portrait, even though you put it as landscape. Automatic color detection will help by automatically switching the scanning mode between black & white documents and color documents, depending on what you feed into the scanner.

One cool feature is the blank page detection. Let’s say you have a stack of papers: some are double-sided some not. With this feature, you just activate it and when the document is double-sided it will keep both sides and when it’s not, it will discard the blank page.

The Raven however doesn’t have a multi-stream function, so you can only scan documents with 1 set of settings. Backgrund cleaning and edge correction along with automatic deskew are all integrated in the scanner though. It even has integrated OCR, so you can convert scanned images to Word documents.

Without beating about the bush, we think that this is the best ADF scanner you can buy because it has great user experience, it’s so easy to use because of that touchscreen and customer satisfaction is sky high. It also comes with a 3-year warranty and it is great value for money.

Its Amazon rating of 4.8 puts it above all other automatic document feeder scanners on the market.

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 a 60 images per minute sheetfed scanner with the scanner ADF having a feeder capacity of 80 pages. The scan speed is even better than on the Raven at 60 ppm. It has a lower daily recommended volume than the Raven at just 4,000 pages. But bear in mind, you’d have to run the scanner quite a lot to get to 4000 sheets per day consistently.

Like the Raven it’s not an A3 scanner, just A4, but it does have a more advanced image sensor and it has the ability to scan and produce high-quality images at up to 1200dpi scan resolution. So you get almost 4 times more detail in the scanned image and the extra detail will be visible on computer monitors. That makes it a great photo scanner as well. It’s not Epson perfection V600 but the extra resolution will help. It’s nice to have a color photo and documents scanner in an all-in-one package. The Automatic Document Feeder ADF capacity is 80 sheets.

Another plus that this PC and Mac Auto document scanner has over the Raven is that it can scan documents up to 220 inches long. That’s about the total height of 3 persons. On the connectivity side, it’s limited to USB 3.0 as this is not a network scanner and the weight is about the same. This limits its capabilities, it cannot scan to cloud, scan to e-mail or work as a fax machine.

The feed rollers last about 200,000 scans on this Fujitsu image scanner until they need to be replaced, or at least that’s what Fujitsu states. This is better than what other scanners with ADF can do, for example in this selection, the average is 150,000 sheets. It’s worth looking at what people who used it for that amount say.

All the image correction features are there in the scanning software, from Auto Rotation, Blank Page detection and Multi-Stream. This last one is a feature that lets you scan the same document in several scanning modes but with just 1 pass. Automatic Cropping will reduce the canvas of the image so that it’s at the right size, no unnecessary space around it and edge correction will make it look even more close to perfect.

This ADF document scanner also has a feature that cleans the background of the image, so it looks nice and white. Manual feed mode is another feature that you usually find on professional scanners, where you can feed the paper manually, one by one. This is good with fragile documents that you can’t just stack on top of eachother. Some other professional features like the Barcode Recognition one are present. Barcode recognition reads barcodes on the documents and interprets them with the possibility to use them as metadata.

Of course OCR is built-in with the sheetfeed scanner and it would have been really bad if it weren’t. But Zonal OCR is also built into it. If you have many forms with the same layout, you can set the scanner to read and extract some fields directly into a structured database. The scanner comes with a USB cable and AC Adapter included in the package.

I personally would classify the Fi-7160 as a production scanner. Fujitsu also bundled in some basic document management features in it. You can get TWAIN and ISIS drivers for this scanner.

Epson DS-530

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Epson DS-530	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and Ethernet (optional)	35	70	50 sheets	4,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Epson Workforce DS-530 is the 3rd scanner that we would like to cover here. It’s considerably slower than the other scanners with a scanning performance of just 35 sheets per minute which works out at 70 IPM in single pass duplex mode. The Auto document feeder ADF tray (or sheet feeder) is also quite smaller as it just holds 50 sheets of paper in it. The average scanner listed here has an 80-sheets ADF tray. The duty cycle is the same as with the Fujitsu, at 4,000 sheets per day. This is also an A4 scanner with an optical resolution of 600 dpi per inch and the sensor can scan documents up to 240 inches long.

As far as connectivity goes, the Epson office document scanner is built-in with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and as an optional, you can get it with an ethernet port. It’s also a bit lighter than the others at 8.1 lbs, so not a big difference. The feed rollers don’t last as long though. With just 100,000 sheets, this one will eat up the feed rollers the fastest out of all the 4.

This document scanner with ADF comes equipped with a host of intelligent scanning features such as auto color detection, automatic rotation, edge correction and even background cleaning. It has a an automatic deskew function and punch hole removal. It’s worth noting that you’ll find these feature on mostly all of the scanners with ADF that we’re proposing here.

OCR software is also present and bundled in with the scanner software package just like in most desktop document scanners with ADF. We always like scanners that come with an ABBYY license because the OCR accuracy is superior to the integrated ones. This is a document scanner for PC and Mac and TWAIN drivers are available for both on Epson’s website. The DS-530 automatic document scanner is also quite light at just 8.1 lbs. It’s not a mobile scanner by any means, but it’s lighter than the other models. The software bundle includes: Epson Document Capture, Epson Document Capture Pro, Epson Document Capture Pro Server, Epson Scan 2, Newsoft Presto BizCard 5.6. The Document Capture software has a feature where it scans directly to the Cloud to Google Drive or Evernote accounts. You can also set up this PC and Mac Automatic Document Scanner to send the digital scans directly to a compatible laser printer, photo printer or all-in-one printer.

At this desktop document scanner’s price point (We check prices on Amazon and BH Photo Video at the time of writing), you can also find an alternative, the Brother ADS-2700W wireless high-speed scanner. The concept of this Brother Wireless scanner is that you should be able to scan without using a PC or Mac. Still, it’s good practice to check Amazon for the latest price.

Epson ES-400

Product	Format	Scanning area	Connectivity	Sheets per minute	Images per minute	ADF Size	Daily Duty Cycle	Price
Epson ES-400	A4	8.27 in x 11.69 in	SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and Ethernet (optional)	35	70	50 sheets	4,000 sheets	Click for more info

The Epson Workforce ES-400 color duplex document scanner is the last ADF scanner that we will be covering here. It is not as fast as the other at just 35 images per minute, so this wasn’t designed for fast scanning. It being and ADF scanner, it has an Automatic Feeder Tray that can scan stacks up to 50 sheets in it.

Epson recommends that you scan no more than 4,000 sheets on this device everyday. It’s designed to scan all paper sizes up to A4 format at an optical resolution of 600dpi (that’s enough for scanning photos and documents). It also comes with a long document scanning mode which will cover extra-long A4 documents at up to 240 inches in length. As with the other Epson, it’s equipped with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 as standard with the option of adding an Ethernet port for network functionality. This one is also quite light at just 8.1 lbs. If weight is an issue for you then you may be wanting to look at something like the Epson Workforce ES-50 portable sheetfed document scanner.

The similarities continue with the lifespan of the feed rollers of the scanning system(the only consumables in a duplexing ADF scanner) which is at 100,000 sheets. If you scan about 500 sheets per day at the office, it should last for about a year or so.

Apart from streaks correction, this 600 DPI A4 scanner has all the Digital ICE image processing features to improve the scan quality of your color scans: Auto color detection, image rotation, Blank Page detection and other features for saving time and effort when post-processing scans. Zonal OCR is a feature that I really like because it helps when you have thousands of documents with the same layout and you want to import the data into a database. The integrated Epson software also allows you to upload scanned images to your favourite cloud storage such as Google Drive, an essential feature for scanners with ADF. We would not recommend getting one without. You also get the classic OCR engine for Document Capture which helps you output the scans to a searchable PDF file. It is worth noting that most of these features come as standard, even on your average portable duplex document scanner.

Which are the best scanners with ADF?

We think the Raven is the scanner to get, but if you have a more generous budget and you need some more advanced features, we warmly recommend you go for the Fujitsu. We also recommend that you compare prices on Amazon, because different sellers retail them. There is also another option to consider, the Fujitsu ScanSnap IX1500.

You may have noticed we didn’t include other office products such as the Kodak Alaris, Fujitsu ScanSnap, Epson FastFoto high-speed photo scanner with automatic document feeder, HP Scanjet PRO, Xerox Documate, Xerox XD-Combo Duplex Combo flatbed document scanner, Brother ImageCenter (or the new Canon ImageFormula R40 office document scanner) compact desktop scanners in our review, but you will find them in other reviews on our website.

You may have noticed that all these are high-speed automatic document scanners. If you need flatbed scanners like the Canon CanoScan Lide models and Epson Perfection photo scanning devices, check out our other reviews.

Also, these are dedicated scanners. We operate a digitization center and we rely only on dedicated document scanners, not multifunction printers such as the Epson Expression or portable document scanners.

If you are looking for portable scanners, we warmly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i mobile document scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap IX100 and the Brother ADS-1700W compact mobile document scanner. One particular scanner we want to look at is the VuPoint Magic Wand Portable Scanner ST-470. The VuPoint ST-470 has a docking station which makes it a hybrid image scanner because you can use it with in 2 modes.

We also use flatbed document scanners only when automatic scanners cannot do the job, like with fragile documents or plastic ID cards. If you want to see reviews of portable scanners, check out our website where we have posted plenty of them.