Brother DS-700D review

Manual paper feeding is common in this type of scanner, but we found that it wasn’t always easy to offer sheets to the DS-700D, with some seeming to snag on the right-hand side of the paper entry area. Thin magazine pages tended to take a slightly crooked path through the scanner, producing subtly curved results. We also learned to wait until the paper transport had come to a standstill after ejecting the previous sheet before adding another, as otherwise it would be pulled through quickly without being included in the scan.

While the scanner’s hardware isn’t the best, it’s the included software that really disappoints. The best competitors have excellent one-touch scanning modes that automatically deal with a varied stack of paper, but Brother’s DSmobilSCAN II software leaves the user to decide whether to scan in colour or greyscale, and whether to capture one or both sides of the originals. While the supplied Presto! PageManager 9 can use OCR to produce a searchable PDF file, it can’t suppress blank pages, or automatically rotate pages that were upside down.

The DS-700D may seem like a bargain, but in practice it’s comfortably outclassed by several competitors. We’d gladly pay more for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 or the Canon ImageFormula P-215.