ADS-4700W Professional Desktop Scanner with Fast Scan Speeds, Duplex, Wireless, and Large Touchscreen, White

At first I had trouble getting this to work properly from my computer. But Brother has been upgrading the desktop software and that is making a huge difference. The firmware is also being upgraded. Just a little glitch remaining in the paper handler, if you are scanning multi-page document of exactly the same size paper that is a little "sticky" and pages drag the others along, the scanner stops with a "jam" message and throws the scan away. This has always been a problem with multi-page scanners, so nothing inherently bad here. Everything else is amazing. Perfectly small footprint on my desk. Different size papers in the stack? No worries, it just does them all. Some double sided and some not? It is smart enough to skip totally white pages (most of the time). It's super fast! Make sure you extend the catch tray, the paper comes flying out! I have thousands of archive pages of lots of different formats to scan, this is the perfect unit. Unfortunately the free PDF handling software package is total crap. It's not from Brother, its some knockoff software, of which the company apparently has been acquired or gone under, anyway its useless. So if you're doing PDFs, budget for a PDF manager to organize the resulting scanned documents. Rotating pages, deleting pages you don't need, merging PDFs into archives, etc. is something you'll want to do once the scanner is finished and the PDFs are on your computer.

Had a site who wanted to scan docs and then email them. The site had an older scanner unit that required a PC and software to scan to pdf. Then they would fire up chrome and gmail and attach scan to send on to the desired recipient. The old unit and PC did work, but limited number of people knew how to do it and the PC software did not always behave well. So Installed the Brother ADS-4700W unit and voila, problem solved. Once I had the smtp relay setup and added the email address they used most often to the extensive address book, anyone could walk up, scan, and select the desired recipient from the address book and send. The site loves the unit and it is really slick. I would totally recommend this unit for home professionals and smb businesses.

After trying some of the competition I had lowered my standards for scanners. so overall it is an acceptable device. 4 out 5 stars is taking to account the competition being worse. it would be lower on its own. The ability to save to network without using a computer in the middle is very nice. although the interface is clunky, and almost none of its features are available when doing so. if you want the various software features you need to be using windows and install their clunky proprietary software. it DOES have a detection mechanism for multiple pages entering at once. which is annoying common when multi feeding. overall it is fast. although nowhere near as advertised. as it takes longer to process a page than it does to scan it. and if you want your scans to look reasonably well you will need to scan at 600dpi (max). don't worry about file sizes, it will compress them very well afterwards. It cannot handle receipts. you can narrow down the input to the size of a receipt. but the roller won't grip it properly and it will twist while scanning. on a standard 12 inch receipt. the bottom was about 1 inch off to the side. and then it automatically crops the receipt based on the top of the page not the entire thing. which means it will cut off a sizeable portion of the receipt. making it useless. overall, I think I am just going to stick to flatbed scanner instead.

Great scanner. Saves us tons of time

Once it hits 20-35 pages scanning it disconnects from the computer which, computers hate. You know how computers will say DO NOT UNPLUG OR TURN OFF during transfer because it corrupts data? Yeah the scanner unplugs itself for us. Lots of errors and software breaking involving resetting computer, reinstalling software and hours of the day lost (multiple weeks and months, my IT guy is losing his mind) Scanner Cannot handle what it’s advertised:/ sending back for a replacement will amend review if I got a lemon and I’ll swear up and down brother is the best, and I was wrong if that is the case. But it seems software and firmware related problem, can’t handle large file sizes. If your gonna spend $450 on a scanner in 2024-2025 it better darn work as advertised.

This scanner might work well for other people with other needs. I work at a small credit union (less than 40 employees, across 4 locations), and we need a scanner that can be set up with Active Directory, for individual employees to be able use a centralized scanner, to scan to their network folders on our shared drive(s). This scanner when reading up on its features and capabilities seemed like it would work well for that. It did not!!! Trying to set up the scanner for more than just the basic click-and-scan type functions, required a high-level degree of IT knowledge, reading 3 different 50 page manuals (that were hard to even find online), and you need better luck than lottery winners have, as their software -and instructional videos- all seems to be quite outdated. After many attempts, much research, hours and hours of time wasted -not to mention the $500 cost of the scanner, I was never able to come close to getting it to do what I needed, so I gave up and am returning the scanner. It maybe is something that I just do not have enough skill/knowledge on the IT side of things to set up that feature properly, as I am a very "new" and lower level IT person. However, it shouldn't take a Masters in Computer Sciences (or similar type of degree) to be able to figure out how to set up a f@&%!#g Scanner, to do what it says you should be able to do with it!!! I never scanned a single document, but was not impressed with any of their software. As I mentioned, tech-support videos seemed outdate, and were not much help for what I was trying to do. Their manuals that you have to dig for online (also their website was down part of the times when I was looking for support) explain things poorly, and contradict parts of what the videos explain to do. On another note, the "Touch Screen" LCD display was GARBAGE! It was hard to push buttons, you had to use a ton of force, it took a long time to register the key you pushed, and was easy to push the wrong button. I ended up using a Stylus to type in passwords on it, but it was still very insensitive to touch, had to push hard, and was SLOW to type anything in at all. In my opinion this thing was a very expensive, not user friendly, and a waste of my time and money to attempt to meet my companies needs with it. Maybe its fine for basic scanning, but with what I gathered -and the amount of frustration I got- from using it, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for even that. Get a Fujitsu for less money than this one, they work well for "basic" scanning needs.

Precisely what our (medical) office was looking for to scan documents directly into a shared Synology NAS. Set up was easy and flawless. No need to connect USB, etc. Simply connect the scanner to your network via ethernet (or wireless) - and configure NAS details (IP address, shared folder name, account ID and pwd on NAS to use), profiles, etc. from any computer on the network via browser (not complicated. just need the scanner's IP address from the front panel and the factory set admin pwd on the label in the back).The whole set up process, from opening the box tp creating the shared folder on NAS, account etc. took less than 30 mins. and we were rocking. Scan speed, even for color, 2-sided was surprisingly fast. Physically, product looks well-built despite being all plastic and light in weight. Super pleased with the product. Highly recommend it for dedicated scanning use.

Update: 1 week of work later SFTP FTP and Email work. None of the cloud options will work. It works, extremely fast but an absolute nightmare to configure having to go back from on screen gui to web access gui. Very disappointing. You can only change icons on the gui from the gui. To add shares you have to use web access. You cannot make shortcuts from the web access but you can from the gui on screen. None of the web apps or plugins loaded. Server not available. Cannot use with any modern storage simply. Its like this product is stuck in time and abandoned. that aside. It scans well. Applying shares is a huge PITA for this device. May be returning if I spend any more time on it. The lack of cloud services is one thing....I can work with that and SMB share....if it works simply.