Was in the market for one of those tiny, portable scanners and came across this deal. This scanner normally sells for $249 but HN are selling these for $178. I had it price-beat at Officeworks yesterday so I paid $169.10 but I can see they've now lowered the price to match HN's. This is the first portable scanner i've ever had so I'm not sure if this is a good scanner or a bad one. I did set it up and tested it and it worked as expected.
Clear high-res scans without shadows or distortion.
Just like the Google PhotoScan App!
A 600dpi scan will be a lot more detailed than a PhotoScan scan.
The PhotoScan scan is perfectly fine for people who just want a copy of an invoice for warranty or similar. But if you're a business or office and you need to scan multiple invoices or forms every day, teaching your staff to take four slow photos then adjusting corners to make sure it looks professional then copying the image to a desktop computer definitely isn't ideal.
You can't expect them to use their personal phones so you'd have to buy an office mobile with a good quality camera which would cost more than this purpose-built device anyway.
@eug: Exactly the reason I bought this. I have Doc Scanner Pro (from this deal https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/110944) on my phone and for a long time, i didn't feel the need to have a proper scanner. Now that I need to scan a lot more regularly, I decided to get one of these, much less mucking around.
Try Microsoft lens
Potential buyers should note that these are very different from flatbed scanners and they make it very difficult to scan your privates.
Thanks for sharing your experiences…
did it get jammed?
Title for you
Epson WorkForce A4 Document Scanner ES-60W $178 + Delivery ($0 Click & Collect / In-store) @ Officeworks
I'm not sure HN offers an extra discount beyond a price match (couldn't find anything on their website), but friends don't let friends (or anyone) shop at Harvey Norman. Also, nice price
I use the Dropbox scanner on my Android phone. Works well enough.
Dropbox thanks you too
They haven't mentioned it.
They’ll mention it after the data breach
Can you scan directly to a usb or memory card?
If anyone else is interested in ditching paper and moving to digital copies of everything, there's a great roundup of document scanners here - https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-portable-doc…
I bought the Brother unit on the strength of that review a few years ago, and it's been excellent 👍
You can just dump a 10 page document into the feeder, and it'll scan both sides of every page, directly to your computer, with absolutely no input from you, and produce a fully searchable OCR'd PDF. It just works, and it's fully automatic.
(You do need to manually rename the resulting PDF file though, the auto generated filenames are useless)
Years back I wanted to get a networked document scanner but couldn't justify the cost. Ended up with a Fuji multifunction which does the job ok but recently I've been digitising old documents and wish it was a least duplex scanning.
Luckily most stuff is single sided but double sided stuff I have to drop them in the ADF, flip over the whole stack and put them through again and put the 2 pdfs through PDFsam which at least takes care of the interleaving and reversing of page orders etc. Quite the PITA. Even worse when during one side of the scans it decides to pull 2 sheets of paper through at once.
At the other end though happy I picked up a Rexel 110 sheet autofeed shredder when I saw one sitting on the shelf at Officeworks for $50…
Which specific model did you buy that can scan both sides?
The one right there in the link I posted 🤷🏼♂️
Click the link and start reading 😎
Yes i read the review, there are 3 brother scanner on that link and the recommended one doesn't do a duplex scanning hence I'm asking which specific model.
@haizail: Both the recommended Brother models do duplex scanning.
Brother ADS-1250W
"Scan single and double sided, documents in a single pass at up to 25 ppm"
Brother ADS-1700W
"Scan single and double-sided, documents in a single pass at up to 25 ppm"
The usual cloud suspects like Dropbox and OneDrive and Google all support full file-contents searching etc so you can just dump everything into your cloud provider of choice, with some sort of decent folder structure, and it all works fine 😎
I'm all for going paperless and in fact, that's pretty what I've done over the last decade.
I've always wanted one of these things, but could never justify the cost. My main device is a multifunction brother laser. works well enough. I get the feeling the software on my unit wouldn't be as feature rich as on these.
In recent years, I've also used the mobile app scanners on phones and while not perfect, they get the job done well enough. I still want a stand alone scanner with all the document handling features, but with technology the way it is, it's looks even less likely now.
What irks me the most is that I had a flatbed scanner from a few decades ago that had excellent software! Took perfect scans without dramas and automatically straightened and cropped stuff. It even saved in small file sizes. (Basically everything I miss in my current Brother multifunction) I just had to let it go because it wasn't supported on modern OSs. I remember it didn't cost a pretty penny either! Grrrrr
FWIW I've been using a scanner like this which has an auto document feeder, scans both sides in a single pass, and can scan to a network share. It has a screen that shows you a preview of what's being scanned.
It runs independently of a computer. I've set mine up to scan to a standard Windows shared folder that syncs with Google Drive so all I do is put my docs in the feeder, press a button, and the PDF appears on Google Drive. You can point it to your NAS or an FTP site too.
I use a different model at home but also bought two of those exact ones above for work. I've set them up to scan to a network share but haven't deployed them yet. They seem to work fine.
Looks like Officeworks have decided to stop selling online whilst price matching; I haven't seen them do that before. Must be a pretty good price.
"This product cannot currently be purchased online, but here is something similar!"
Microsoft Lens is another good mobile app for taking pictures of documents. Works really well.
I wonder what this can do that the mobile couldn't do!