rdagger on Amazon 5 years ago
02/12/2018, 09:55 AM
Fantastic for small network
This is a fantastic solution for small office scanning. We bought the Brother because we have a very expensive Xerox copier that we use for scanning, but it breaks down so much that we needed a back up. After a few weeks of using the Brother, nobody in the office uses the Xerox any more except for oversize scans. The Brother has become the primary scanner and everyone in the office has given it positive reviews.
It works great. I've only seen it jam once and that was because someone didn't remove the staple from a document. The document feeder is supposed to only hold 50 sheets, but that seems very conservative. People have been filling it up with much more and there have been no glitches. It's easily as fast as the giant Xerox and much faster than most multi-function scanning devices.
I thought the set up was incredibly easy and intuitive, but I do work with computers. Still, I find many similar products limited in terms of compatibility and terribly unintuitive in terms of set up and user interaction. The Xerox was a nightmare to set up for network scanning. We have another Brother MFC device in the office and it was very difficult to integrate into our network because it had very limited network capabilities and it requires the user to navigate through 6 screens before they can scan.
One of the best features of this device is that there are 3 programmable buttons on the front of the scanner. I set up the first button for color documents, the 2nd button for black and white documents and the third for reduced file size black and white scans. All a user needs to do to scan a document is insert the paper and press one of the buttons. That's it, 1 button and the document get scanned and uploaded to our server. Please note that you really do need a server or a NAS to get the benefits of this scanner. If you're not going use the networking then you are probably better off buying a cheaper Fujitsu without networking. I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap at home and it's great, but only for a single user.
The only draw back some offices might have is if they need more than 3 presets. Many offices like to have a button for each employee which goes to a private server folder. That wasn't a requirement for us. We only have a dozen people in the office so a single network share with the 3 presets works great.