Brother ADS-1600W or ADS-1700W scanner - any one used one?

[dna]

I'm starting to look for a compact desktop scanner with a power feed. This is to digitise paper invoices / receipts for our accounts so we can stop storing a ton of paper.

This brother scanner looks a good fit for us as it is compact enough to sit on my desk but i'd appreciate any one's experience of using one and the associated software.

Any alternative machine suggestions gratefully received as well

Thanks

DNA

 

[Jev88]

I bought a small Canon XX5500 series.
Tried some cheap inks (it has 5 separate cartridges) from fleabay and can't fault them for £7.99 per pack of ink.

 

[dna]

I bought a small Canon XX5500 series.
Tried some cheap inks (it has 5 separate cartridges) from fleabay and can't fault them for £7.99 per pack of ink.

Do you have a link to the machine page please - google won't find one for me

 

[Jev88]

Broken Link Removed

 

[Jev88]

and matching inks,

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[Minxy]

I don't know if you can get one one cheaply but when I was at work we had a lovely little desktop scanner, it was no larger than the toner cartridge of most printers, rather than have a 'flat bed' it was a 'feed' one which was much more use as I could put a full document in and let it chug away pulling each piece of paper in to be scanned in turn, no messing about having to lift the lid and manually swap the stuff to be copied.

 

[dna]

I don't know if you can get one one cheaply but when I was at work we had a lovely little desktop scanner, it was no larger than the toner cartridge of most printers, rather than have a 'flat bed' it was a 'feed' one which was much more use as I could put a full document in and let it chug away pulling each piece of paper in to be scanned in turn, no messing about having to lift the lid and manually swap the stuff to be copied.

That's the kind I'm looking for with the power feeder - we do have a flat bed scanner / inkjet printer similar to the one Jev88 suggested but it's too big for my desk so its on a shelf at the other side of the office. Not easy when I have a stack of little receipts to scan into separate PDF files for the tax man
This is the brother scanner I've seen

 

[Minxy]

Ah, I assumed due to the comments by others it was a flatbed printer/scanner you were looking at. Not many people realise these 'feed' scanners exist, some do double sided scanning apparently.

As for small receipts etc you might try putting them in a 'sleeve' which is like 2 sheets of A4 acetate joined along one short edge into which you 'sandwich' several small receipts (in groups) and then feed the 'sandwich' into the scanner to create one image - this saves having lots of small document files, reducing the amount of storage space taken up on your machine and when you need them you can usually find them much easier than looking through a great long list of receipts. Oh, and if you can scan them as .jpgs as this again saves a lot of space as .pdfs can take up a lot of space.

 

[dna]

We use a cloud based accounts system where each transaction can have a file attached - storage would not be too significant unless we kept local copies of everything. I do need to do a bit more research on allowable formats both by the software and HMRC rules.

Thank you all for the help

 

[MyrtleGuru]

Can't help with that particular model, but we have a Brother ADS-2600W. It's a bit more expensive, but a very fast and compact workhorse.

It had to be portable, so we could take it away with a laptop to use on site for work. And it had to be fast as we work on documents of several hundred pages (the feeder takes 50 pages).

We connect to it wirelessly. The only issue we had was with the software: because we were switching between different networks (some with peculiar configurations), sometimes it was just quicker to re-install the software from scratch rather than try to get it recognised on a new network. Sticking with the same network or using a wired connection would have been easier, but wasn't always feasible for us.

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[mitzimad]

why cant you just photograph them with a phone most of the accounting software works that way?

 

[Minxy]

why cant you just photograph them with a phone most of the accounting software works that way?

Occasionally I'll do that but to be fair it's not always that easy to get a good well defined image of 'flat' documents and you often have to spend time faffing about 'cropping' etc them, so scanning will be quicker and easier especially if you have a few as having to lay out, photograph, then change the document for another is a nuisance.