Brother ADS-1700W mobile scanner | An honest review.

What’s so special about it?

portable, time-saving, ease of use, these are some of the reasons why the Brother ADS-1700W is the ideal scanner for home, home office or for use at professional workplaces. You can automatically scan to your favorite cloud storage account through Brother Web Connect. It also has a color touchscreen LCD that you can use to operate the scanner, giving it a big advantage over most portable scanners. The scanner has a few pre-set destinations to which you can scan to: File, Scan to e-mail, Network folder, USB flash drive, FTP server or mobile.

Brother ADS-1700W Datasheet Explained

With an image speed of 50 images per minute(50IPM), this scanner is able to scan both sides of stacks of double-sided, color and black and white materials up to 25 ppm (Pages per minute) at once with it’s 20-page sheet capacity auto documented feeder.

The Brother ADS-1700W scanner has an optical resolution of 600dpi which makes it capable of providing a decent and good enough scanning resolution. This super scanner possesses a Wireless 802.II b/g/n and can also connect via USB 3.0 which enables the user to scan through a network or even smartphones and also scan directly to cloud apps. Of course, there is also the option of scanning to USB drives which is specific just to a few Brother models. It can use both power sources, AC and USB power. The USB cable is very specific as it is like the ones you get on Western Digital USB Drives.

The Brother ADS-1700W offers the TWAIN, WIA, ICA, SANE interface and it is very flexible when it comes to supporting business processes or systems as it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux environment.

This scanner, like most of its peers, makes use of a dual CIS server. Although this type of server requires the document to be scanned to touch the surface of the scanning glass perfectly in order to achieve a perfect scan, it is one of the characteristics that contribute immensely to the scanner’s lightness in weight and it’s low price.

The daily duty cycle for this portable scanner is 1,000 sheets per day.

Like most of the portable scanners, the Brother ADS-1700W allows the paper thickness of the following forms; plain paper, thin paper, thick paper, thicker paper, recycled paper, business card, plastic cards and plastic ID Cards. .

Features for Productivity

Taking into account that not all portable scanners within a similar price range gave the ability to scan both sides of a document at the same time, the possession of duplex scanning definitely helps to increase the productivity level of the Brother ADS-1700W and to reduce time and effort for any user.

This colour scanner will allow you to scan without any color preset since it has the automatic color detection feature. The automatic color detection is a great feature when you have mixed color documents and you don’t want to manually maneuver between settings. Although this setting is not bulletproof, it will work 95% of the time.

Like most of it’s kind, this scanner has the ability to let it’s driver decide on what the final layout of the document will be. That is, you do not have to manually switch between the portrait in the landscape. This ability is enabled through the possession of the Automatic Image Rotation feature.

The Brother ADS-1700W scanner cannot scan documents automatically in order to crop the scan accordingly because it does not possess an Automatic Image Cropping feature.

One of the features that this scanner possesses which most portable scanners with a similar price do not is the ability to clean and optimize your documents for a clean white background. Having a clean white background usually emphasizes and increases the sharpness of the document. .

Quality of images

Another characteristic of the ADS-1700W portable scanner is the ability to align documents that were not scanned straight through the use of a software called Automatic Deskew. Because of dirty feed rollers or the fact that the operator has not aligned the document correctly, sometimes documents are not scanned straight. Therefore, this feature works like an algorithm that calculates automatically the correct alignment of the paper and it aligns it accordingly.

Another feature that this scanner possesses which is not common among its peers is the Punch Hole Remover. This feature is dedicated to punched or perforated documents. Sometimes you need to punch documents to put them in a folder or to archive them. When you scan them without such a feature, the holes in the paper will turn out black on the scanned document. The feature analyzes and determines there s a punched hole in the area and corrects it by making it white or the color of the background of your document.

Like all other portable scanners with a similar price, the Brother ADS-1700W scanner has OCR. portable scanners generate images of your document. Therefore, you can’t access, search or modify the content of your scanned document. OCR ( Optical Character recognition ) takes each image and creates a searchable document from that image, most of the cases in PDF or Word. It can also be used to create Excel files, ebooks, etc. The color depth is 24-bit when scanning in color and 80bit in grayscale. .

Brother ADS-1700W accesories unboxing

This portable scanner also includes an ADF tray. An ADF or automatic document feeder tray is that part of the scanner where you stack documents, and the scanner feeds them automatically during the scanning process. It’s a great feature to have as it increases productivity and you don’t have to manually feed each of the documents. Some portable scanners will have it some won’t. Usually, an ADF tray will increase the [physical size of the scanner so for very small scanners it’s understandable not to have it.

The weight of the Brother ADS-1700W brother scanner is 3.7lb. (1.67 kg). Of course, most machines will have more or less the same weight.

Just like with the dimension, you can expect that scanners for larger formats such as A3 will have a bigger weight than those for A4.

Some of the included software is; Nuance PaperPort SE with OCR for Windows and some minimal document management features, Brother iprint & scan app, Nuance Power PDF. Epson also makes a solid competitor for this scanner, the Epson Workforce ES-300ws and there is the Visioneer Patriot P15 as well along with the Xerox Duplex scanners. If you want a portable scanner just for photos, then you need to look at the Epson Fastfoto ff-680w and if you want a flatbed scanner that is portable, then the Doxie Flip might be the right option. The best buying options for the ADS-1700 wireless document scanner are Amazon, Best Buy and BH Photo Video. .

Brother ADS-1700W driver, manual & brochure

You can download the driver for the Brother ADS-1700W here https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadend.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=ads1700w_all&os=10012&dlid=dlf104015_000&flang=4&type3=11 You can also find the user manual here https://download.brother.com/welcome/doc100970/cv_ads1200_use_oug_a.pdf The brochure can also be gotten here https://support.brother.com/g/b/spec.aspx?c=eu_ot&lang=en&prod=ads1700w_all.

What do real users say?

While most of the users like this product, the areas where issues are most raised are; difficulty in setting up, printing of black pages and intermittent failure with non-solution based customer service. <!–

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