Essentially a faster version of the Brother PDS-5000 ($0.00 at Amazon) we reviewed recently, the $1,399.99 Brother PDS-6000 High-Speed Color Desktop Scanner is a fast and accurate sheet-feed document scanner for high-volume use in small and medium-size offices and workgroups. Speed-wise, it's rated slightly higher than its less expensive sibling and that model's comparably priced competitor, the Editors' Choice HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow 7000 . In testing, it did manage to scan faster and save to image PDF a little quicker than both the PDS-5000 and ScanJet 7000, but not enough to warrant the PDS-6000's $500 price difference. Besides, when saving to the more useful searchable PDF format, it fell well behind the ScanJet 7000 and other competitors. Even so, if raw imaging speed is what you're looking for, the PDS-6000 hardware is among the fastest we've recently seen in this class.
Design and Features
Weighing 10.3 pounds and measuring 7.2 by 12.4 by 7.3 inches (HWD) with its trays closed, the PDS-6000 ($1,886.79 at Amazon) is exactly the same size and weight as the PDS-5000. In fact, on the outside, the only difference between them is the name on the face of the chassis. Both Brother models measure about the same as the ScanJet 7000 (7.5 by 12.2 by 7.8 inches, 8.4 pounds), though they are about 2 pounds heavier. Another Editors' Choice recipient, the Epson WorkForce DS-860 ($1,225.00 at Amazon) (8.1 by 11.8 by 8.7 inches, 8.8 pounds) is a little longer and taller and somewhat lighter, but for the most part they all have similar footprints. And when you extend the input and output trays on any of them (and most other competing models), they all increase significantly in height and depth. The PDS-6000 (as well as the PDS-5000) comes with a 100-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), the highest capacity among the scanners we discuss here, whereas both the ScanJet 7000's and the DS-860's ADFs hold 80 sheets. The Canon imageFormula DR-M160II ($572.99 at Amazon) , yet another Editors' Choice, has only a 60-sheet input tray, but its 7,000-scan rated daily duty cycle is higher than the PDS-6000's (and the PDS-5000's) 6,000 scans. The DS-860 is, like the Canon model, rated at 7,000 scans per day, and the ScanJet 7000 has a 7,500-scan duty cycle.
Similar to several higher-volume document scanners, including the ScanJet 7000 and its lower-capacity sibling, the ScanJet 5000, the PDS-6000's control panel is designed to let you select predefined workflow profiles from the face of the scanner itself. An Up/Down toggle button allows you to scroll through profiles on a 2-line monochrome LCD. Supported file formats are JPEG, TIFF, image and searchable PDF, and Microsoft Office Word and Excel; and workflow destinations include: e-mail, FTP, OCR, Microsoft SharePoint, network files, and printer. The PDS-6000's highest resolution is 600dpi, and unlike the ScanJet 7000, which supports network scanning via an optional Wi-Fi add-on, networking is unavailable on the PDS-6000. The Brother ADS-3600W ($999.97 at Amazon) (yet another Editors' Choice and excellent mid-volume scanner in its own right), on the other hand, supports network scanning over built-in Wi-Fi and Ethernet. In addition, the PDS-6000 supports batch barcode scanning for searching and sorting batch scans, and it's Kofax VRS certified. (Kofax increases the accuracy of poor quality scans, but the Kofax software is not included.)
Software
Unlike many higher volume scanners, including the ScanJet 7000, the PDS-6000's software bundle doesn't include Windows document and business card archiving programs, but you do get a state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) application, Nuance OmniPage SE 18, and, for Macs, Presto PageManager 9, a document management app with a scanning utility built in. You also get Brother's DS Capture, which is a Windows scanner driver with a slick interface designed primarily for big batch scanning. It's fast and saves to a number of file formats, except searchable PDF, but if you need that, a button inside DS Capture brings up Adobe Acrobat DC's extensive PDF creation, editing, and management menus and options—as long as you have Acrobat DC on your PC, of course.
Similar Products
The primary interface is, however, Button Manager, which has a user interface consisting of a column of buttons associated with eight editable predefined profiles. The buttons themselves have names like Scan to File, Scan to File (OCR), Email, and Scan to SharePoint, and you can create and add your own buttons to the list. These are also the profile names displayed on the scanner's LCD, unlike the ScanJet 7000's control panel that displays only profile numbers, forcing your users to remember what each profile does, or use cheat sheets. As I said in my review of the PDS-5000, the backend options in Button Manager for defining profiles are extensive enough to be complicated, but all your users see is a list of buttons, or descriptive profile names on the LCD when initiating scans from the scanner itself. Button Manager can take much of the training out of deploying the PDS-6000 among your non-technical users and team members.
Brother also throws in EMC QuickScan Pro, an alternative scanning interface to editing or creating new profiles in Button Manager.
Brother PDS-6000 High-Speed Color Desktop Scanner
Performance
The PDS-6000 is fast, but it fell just short of its rating of 80 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 160 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm), where each page side constitutes an image. (I tested over USB 3.0 with Button Manager on our standard Core i5 PC running Windows 10.) Without the time required to process and save our test scans to either image or searchable PDF, what we call "lag time," pages zipped through the scanner at 76.9ppm and 153.8ipm—blazingly fast, 16.9ppm and 33.8ipm faster than the PDS-5000. What's important, though, is how fast scans are saved to a usable format. The PDS-6000 scanned and saved our test pages to image PDF at 63.3ppm and 117.6ipm, which is faster than the HP ScanJet 7000's 60ppm and 111ipm, and much faster than the Canon DR-M160II's 55ppm and 96ipm. The Epson DS-860, though, managed 73ppm and 146ipm when saving to image PDF, and the Brother PDS-5000 came in at 60ppm and 113.2ipm.
Unfortunately, the PDS-6000's times for scanning and subsequently processing and saving to the more useful searchable PDF format aren't quite as stellar. It took, for instance, 1 minute, 14 seconds—almost four times longer than without the lag time—to scan, process, and save our two-sided 25-sheet (50 pages) test document to searchable PDF. Admittedly, the relationship between how long a scanner takes to scan and subsequently save a file is not all that critical. What is important, though, is how these numbers compare among competitors. All of the scanners discussed here, except the PDS-5000, turned paper pages in to searchable text faster than the PDS-6000. The ScanJet 7000 took 44 seconds to perform the same task; the DR-M160II took 32 seconds; and the DS-860 took 1:12. How important these numbers are, of course, depends on your particular application.
OCR
The PDS-6000's accuracy for converting scanned text to editable text, while more than passable, was a bit subpar compared to its competitors. It converted both our Arial and Times New Roman pages without errors down to 8 points, compared to the Epson DS-860's and the HP ScanJet 7000's 6 points for each font, and the Canon DR-M160II's 5 points for both fonts. As we said about the PDS-5000 (and several other scanners with conversion rates of 8 points), in most business settings, 8 points without errors is more than adequate—unless your documents contain smaller than average print.
Brother PDS-6000 High-Speed Color Desktop Scanner
Fast Enough?
Many businesses deploy scanners in existing document management systems that already have solutions for converting scanned text to searchable text. In these scenarios, the scanner sends images of pages into these systems and they are processed behind the scenes, separate from the scanning itself. Some of these management systems process thousands of scans in huge batches, and often the speed of the scanning hardware itself is much more important than how fast the scans get processed and saved to the desired text format.
Fast scanners like the PDS-6000 are ideal for these settings. However, the problem we see with the PDS-6000 is that it's not fast enough to warrant the huge price difference between it and the PDS-5000, which is essentially the same scanner minus some tweaking that makes the PDS-6000 a little faster. That said, unless your application calls for squeezing maximum speed out of the hardware, the PDS-5000 may be a better value. If you need all the speed you can get, though, this is one of the fastest scanners we've seen in this price range, making it a decent choice for high-volume scanning in small-to-medium-size offices and workgroups, especially those with pre-established workflows.
The Brother PDS-6000 is a fast, reasonably accurate sheet-feed document scanner with a top-notch user interface, but its slightly slower PDS-5000 sibling is essentially the same machine for a lot less moolah.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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