A desktop document scanner intended for sole practitioners and home office users, the Brother ADS-2200 ($329.99) provides a fast-rated speed, simple operation, a good software suite, and a basic feature set at a low price. It offers good OCR capabilities and one nifty feature—the ability to scan to USB thumb drives—seldom seen in a scanner in this price range. Set against that are its lack of an LCD and absence of a scan utility, which can make it tricky to configure the ADS-2200 to scan to a format or the settings of your choice.
Basic Look and Features
The ADS-2200, a duplex scanner with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), has a typical size and form for a basic desktop scanner. This two-toned (black and off-white) scanner measures 7 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches (HWD) when closed, and weighs 7.7 pounds. It has a straight-through paper path from the ADF into the output tray, and supports the scanning of business cards as well as plastic cards. Its controls are minimal, with no display and just 4 buttons: Power, Stop, Scan to PC, and Scan to USB Key. As is the case with most document scanners, the ADS-2200's optical resolution is up to 600 ppi.
A nice feature of the ADS-2200 is the ability to scan to USB thumb drives placed in the scanner's USB Type A port. Otherwise, the ADS-2200 connects to a computer via a USB 2.0 cable (not included)—it lacks wired or wireless networking, features that are found in the Editors' Choice Brother ADS-2700W ($540.50 at Amazon) . This pegs the ADS-2200 for single-person use in a home or micro office, or as a personal scanner in a larger office. Its maximum daily duty cycle of up to 3,000 pages is also fitting for that role.
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Software
Software bundled with the ADS-2200 includes Nuance PaperPort 14SE (for Windows), Presto! PageManager (for Mac), and Presto! BizCard 6 for business-card management. It also has Twain and WIA drivers, which let you scan from virtually any program that has a scan command. Missing is a scan utility such as Brother's ControlCenter, which we have seen in previous-generation Brother scanners. In the ADS-2200's user guide, Brother suggests launching scans from Windows Fax and Scan, PaperPort, or any application that supports scanning (that is to say, offers a scan command in its menu or toolbar options).
Speed and Document Management
The ADS-2200 is rated at up to 35 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) scanning and 70 images per minute (ipm) for duplex scanning, in which each side of a two-sided document counts as one image. In my testing, using the Scan to PC button's default settings to scan to file (color image PDF at 300 ppi), it averaged 43 seconds to scan and save a 25-page file, matching its 35ppm rated speed. Our official speeds, though, are measured from when we launch the Scan command until the scanned file is saved, while manufacturers use the time spent in physically scanning the pages for their timings. When I did that, leaving out the time between when I launched the scans and when the paper started moving, and the time spent processing the file after the last page was scanned, the speed increased to 42.8ppm. The speed tailed off in duplex scanning, however, wherein its tested speed fell to 26.3 ppm or 52.6 ipm, still a decent time but a considerable dropoff from its simplex speed.
As I could not scan to a computer in searchable PDF format using the scanner's default settings from its one-touch button, I timed the ADS-2200 in scanning to searchable PDF via Nuance PaperPort. PaperPort is a full-featured document management program. To scan to it, you need to open the program, select the scanner and driver combination to use (through trial and error, I found the ADS-2200's TWAIN driver to be faster than the WIA driver), choose a scan profile from a dialog box, and then tweak any settings before launching the scan. Once the document is scanned, you close the dialog box and the scan is then saved to your chosen format.
Scanning to PaperPort is less than ideal, as it requires more steps than using a scan utility. (Scan utilities generally are accessed by right-clicking on an icon in the Windows taskbar, selecting a profile, and launching the scan.) As PaperPort's default profile for searchable PDF is for scanning in color at 300dpi, I first retested the image PDF speeds using PaperPort's color document (image PDF, color, 300dpi) profile, only to find that it was considerably slower than when I had used the scanner's one-touch button. Switching to the black-and-white document default profile for scanning our two-sided document produced a test speed comparable with my original test (47 seconds). For searchable PDF, switching the settings to support black-and-white scanning, the time increased to 1:02, a modest increase in time for incorporating a text reading and conversion step, although I had to scan and then save the file, turning scanning into a two-step process.
This speed was just off the pace of the fastest speeds we have seen from budget desktop document scanners; we timed the Canon imageFormula DR-C125 at a minute flat in scanning to searchable PDF, the Canon DR-C225 at 1:09, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 at 1:05, the HP ScanJet Pro 3000 s3 at 55 seconds, and the Epson WorkForce ES-500W at just 44 seconds. Finding the settings to optimize the ADS-2200's speed, however, was an involved process. In our experience, typical users tend to stick to default settings unless there's a compelling reason not to, and so most people scanning to PaperPort with the ADS-2200 will probably stick to the default color searchable PDF profile, even if they just scan black-and-white documents. They may be satisfied with its performance, but in terms of speed they're not getting the most out of their scanner.
Text Recognition
The ADS-2200, paired with PaperPort, did reasonably well at OCR, reading our Arial text document perfectly down to 6 points and our Times New Roman document down to 8-point type. That matches the Editors' Choice HP ScanJet Pro 3000 s3 Sheet-Feed Scanner's OCR performance, though it comes up short of the Canon DR-C225 ($497.28 at Amazon) —which converted both fonts to editable text down to 6 points without mistakes—and especially the Brother ADS-2700W, which was error-free down to 5 points in reading and converting our Arial text page, and down to 4 points with our Times New Roman page. For business card management with BizCard 6, it did a reasonable job, entering data in the correct fields with few errors on most of my test cards.
Inexpensive, but With Some Quirks
The Brother ADS-2200 is a basic, low-priced desktop document scanner whose only real frill is its ability to scan directly to a USB thumb drive. It fared reasonably well in our OCR testing, and is capable of fast speed in scanning to both image and searchable PDF formats using PaperPort to launch the scans, although you may have to tweak the settings a bit to achieve it. I missed having a scan utility in testing, not that they're necessarily better, but they tend to be simpler and more intuitive, which is particularly important with an entry-level scanner like the ADS-2200.
Scanning from ReadIRIS, an OCR program, proved preferable to using the manufacturer's utility in our testing of the HP ScanJet Pro 3000 s3 , but it also has a considerably more robust software package than the ADS-2200. Its price is also $100 more, but it's still our Editors' Choice for low-volume business or personal desktop scanners.
The Brother ADS-2200 is a basic desktop document scanner with solid OCR performance and speed, although getting the most out of it may require tweaking some settings.
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